Straying away from the standardized charts of dance music, Metalized Man's debut album for newly established label Foul-Up operates in the gap between strictly visually-evocative audio spaces and more abstract realms, trimming its tech-y ambient apparatus right to the bone.
After two iterations on the Copenhagen-based Infinite Waves, Lasse Bjørck Volkmann delivers a first long-player rich of a spectrum that extends from the murkiest shades to the brightest hues with a zest of trancey tropes, exploring both extremes with a manifest attraction for offhand live dynamics. Whereas it deploys its own sensory experience, 'Losing Your Virginity: Metalized Boy's First Adventures in Manhood' reacts and evolves like a steady biotope submitted to diverse levels of pressure, constantly shifting scales and tempo – from a deep green palette of organic drops and crackles to the sleek vibrancy of multi-faceted synthetic layers – punctured by paranoid ostinatos that ooze nothing but stress and insecurity. As its title suggests it is an initiatory hand-to-hand with the unknown – either a beginning or an ending, but anyhow a fully conscious descent in the most secret nooks of a troubled inner being in search for answers. Just like Edward Artemiev's elemental soundtrack to Tarkovsky's masterpiece 'Stalker' played an essential role in enhancing the film's highly empirical experience, or Badalamenti's iconic contribution to David Lynch's utterly hypnotic, trance-inducing body of work, 'Losing Your Virginity...' shines with a similar poise for setting up its own deeply evocative cinematic playgrounds. Images rise to the surface in a deftly-manoeuvered chaos of sound, elusive like sand gliding from one's hand but haunting like a first time. There is frailty and strength, despair and also ecstasy but more importantly, there is a bigger-than- life quality to this fine collection of mazy proto-tech and drone slabs, that seems to not only emulate concepts for what they are but also what they go against. Proposing rather than proclaiming, questioning rather than answering – moving feverishly as we all do, unsure of what tomorrow holds but well avid to disclose its omens.