Client_03 – Testbed_Assembly

Client 03’s forthcoming triple vinyl release marks a serious leap in scale and ambition for the elusive project, folding 12 new tracks into a dense, dystopian sprawl of electro, computer funk and system-failure ambience. The intention seems to be to push the listener to utter jaw-clenching, meat-ground breaking point so to realise their humanity: «your eyes survey the vast beauty of nature, but you feel nothing, you are a machine.» This unalloyed heavyweight triple LP edition with spot-varnish sleeves, dual bellybands, artbook and webcam slipcover only adds formalistically to the world-machine so built; the record spins and clockworks like a corrupted boot sequence, ‘Registration Error’, ‘Decommission Me (x Shinra)’ and ‘The Last Human (x Lorn)’ all serving an innervated posthuman undercurrent. The British artist’s output has always veered towards the cryptic and coded, but here the aesthetic sharpens – more paranoid, more granular and more (computer) terminal.