I.B.M. - Eat My Fuck

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  • Jamal Moss, the producer behind I.B.M., has always approached his music with the dedication of a religious practice. Two of his aliases, Hieroglyphic Being and The Sun God, reference mystical jazz luminary Sun Ra, and he's said he views music as a means towards higher consciousness. In that sense, his latest record as I.B.M., which stands for Insane Black Man, is less meditation than visceral purge—its leering title, Eat My Fuck, nicely evokes its confrontational sound. Call it a journey away from nirvana, then: through the explicit sexual imagery of the track titles, which range from oblique references ("Psychomenstrum," also the name of an unfinished Lydia Lunch screenplay) to crude anatomical jargon ("Rectum"), Moss gives a rudimentary shape to an insular, sometimes impenetrable outpouring of aggression. "Eat My Fuck" is a migraine-inducing opener that sounds like drills attacking a pallet of Styrofoam. In a way, it was a charitable gesture to place it right at the beginning: what follows is a dirty, often flatly textured synthesis of acid house and industrial music. If you can't handle it, now's the time to bow out. Moss often builds tracks by improvising—it's one of the reasons he's so prolific. Here, that approach gives the music a feeling of rapid-fire momentum. The combination of frenzied synth lines with pounding beats can be grating at times, like on the disjointed "Oral Fixation," which sees Moss piling on ornamental flourishes with an enthusiasm bordering on hysteria. Likewise, most of the album fluctuates constantly between tension and giddiness. But then there are moments that form something weirdly magnetic out of resurrected club sounds, like "Submit 2 Me," an ultra-slow, brooding beat over which a tangled nest of synth noise descends like a spider. Moss isn't quite reaching for the sublime here: the prettiest moment on Eat My Fuck is "Autoluminescent Sex," a queasy cloud of vibrations that emulates physical ecstasy, heavy breathing and all. It's hard to say just what Moss's intentions were for the album, but the music is so focused and fixated on the human body that after a while it starts to feel liberating.
  • Tracklist
      01. Eat My Fuck 02. Rectum 03. Karma Sutra 04. Paradoxia 05. Into The Black Box 06. Oral Fixation 07. Fingered 08. Vortex Of Desire 09. Submit 2 Me 10. Autoluminescent Sex 11. Psychomentsrum 12. AS-FIX-8
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