If you work in the kind of artistic territory that Llamatron does, for it to work fully you have to achieve something like the impossible. You've got to churn up your electronica in a cement mixer of sound, take it as far as it can go and then, somehow, crank it up that notch further. To a notch that, in any common sense idea of the world, doesn't exist. That's when the tune seizes and assaults your brain in a mad fucking frenzy with an intensity you never suspected existed. Into a world in which the rules of over-rated common sense don't apply.
And the great thing about Llamatron is he does this not only in pretty much every tune I've ever heard him put out, but also over what you might (madly) call his career. That is, every time I hear something new from him I expect, and receive, that enormous sonic drive hitting unfeasibly perverse levels but, with each track, something still more amazing. Astonishingly, the stuff just keeps getting better. On his Mirror Of War EP, out recently, we get five tracks that breach the apparently unbreachable to stand as the finest expression of Llamatron's art thus far.
This is not, you may already have gathered, easy listening. Nor is it listening for people who want things to be easy. The title of Mirror Of War gives a stark illustration of visceral death beating like a stillborn monster at the pulsing heart of his masterpiece. In Llamatron's hands, the treatment of war isn't via allegory or delicate artistry, but as a slab of human death laid bare, masterfully delineated in tracks like 'Slay Her' and 'Hymn To The Death', where harsh electronica mutilates its subject brutally and leaves nothing left to be said. Real death, in other words. The absence of being. With nowt taken out.
I love Llamatron's honesty of approach almost as much as I love his work, the sheer joy of which is found lurking in the most graphically violence subject matter. I understand another EP, Ave Llama, is due to be released very soon on the Peace Off label. It will, if precedent holds, be even better than this, which is something I can scarcely believe is possible while simultaneously knowing must be true. Whatever is the case, it will find this remarkable French artist dealing with such paradoxes with a crushing assertiveness that I can never get anywhere near, and nor, as far as I can see, can anyone else.
Hear 'Hymn To The Death' in my May show on Dandelion Radio, streaming at various times throughout the month.
Free Llamatron: Remix of Flatliner by Sinister Souls here
