Redeemer is the brutally seductive debut album by Phase Fatale, a key player in the recent charge of EBM and post punk-informed industrial techno infecting 'floors from his home city, New York City to his DJ residency at Berghain, Berlin. In Dominick Fernow's Hospital Productions, Hayden Payne, aka Phase Fatale, finds a fitting home for his personalized brand of clinical, rictus rhythm programming and searing synth and guitar lines, adding a vital streak of black-and-blue electric energy to the legendary label in its 20th year of cultish operation. In seven parts, Redeemer follows the direct, jagged lines of his 12"s for Jealous God and Unterton to a deeply personal realization of weaponized sonics, upholding a strong tradition of techno as a prophetic exercise or ritual to gird dancers and listeners for the onset of future war. It presents Phase Fatale as an ultimate emissary of electronic violence and domination in the process, steeling the limbic system and muscle memory through a fine-tuned disciplinarian approach to pharmacokinetics and biomechanics. Picking from the leather-bound cadaver of industrial dance music past, Phase Fatale reanimates his influences with pointillist precision and unapologetic force. Alloying muscular bass and metallic percussion with wire-combed 16th note synth lines and a barbed perimeter of guitar distortion, his sound can be heard as a metaphorical representation of holding your line against the attrition of a degenerated present. Each track dances concisely around the five minute mark, unfolding a series of densely packed and subtly rendered minimalist/maximalist structures. The shuddering tension of "Spoken Ashes" opens with banks of rotted chorales against a coalface of hacking stabs, establishing a pent vibe that vacillates precariously thru the adrenalized battery of "Operate Within", to the clenched funk of "Human Shield" and the bombed-out, Alberich-like "Interference," seeming to resolve slightly with the supple roll of "Order Of Severity," before "Beast" bottoms out into immolating synth distortion and "Redeemer" brings up the rear with a coolly-tempered, stoic form of industrial ecstasy. RIYL: Silent Servant, Ancient Methods. Artwork by Silent Servant.
