arottenbit – You Don’t Know What Chiptune Is
arottenbit – You Don’t Know What Chiptune Is
Time To Kill Records
04/10/2024
32:19
Review by Dark Juan
450,000,000/10
Good afternoon. I am writing this in August and the record I am listening to is not due to be released until October. I only put it on because I was curious, but it compelled me to write about it now and bugger the fact that there are a significant number of albums that come before it on my review list. I mean, there is a small descriptive piece a few paragraphs below which is the result of my diseased imagination being stimulated by the absolute fucking cacophony that I have been listening to. The compulsion was all-consuming… resistance was not an option.
I wish I had never activated the Platter of Splatter ™. I wish I had never heard arottenbit and their nightmare fuel of an album.
Crow Cottage is never going to be the same. I’m not going to be able to get the bloodstains out of the walls where arottenbit’s music has forced me to gouge open my flesh and paint this house scarlet, and the screaming inside my head just won’t stop now… it was always there but now it has been released! Mrs Dark Juan has run for the moors and safety and taken the dogs with her and the rest of my family have absented themselves while I rage and scream and gibber madness at the whole wide world while brandishing a knife that I have just used to slice off my own fingers, claret spraying from their stumps all over horrified passers-by as I shriek inchoate screams into the faces of people my contorted visage is a mere inch away from…
I think that there is some deep-seated and very worrying trauma in Italian Electronic musicians, judging by the fact that MASTER BOOT RECORD, Keygen Church and now arottenbit have emerged from there. It is rather disturbing, and makes Dark Juan wonder just how close he came to death on the two occasions he has visited that country and to gravely thank Satan that I fucking got out of there in one piece.
So yeah, welcome to the underbelly of the Italian Extreme Music scene. arottenbit sounds like ‘Come To Daddy’ era Aphex Twin and what he would do when wired on caffeine and speed and listening to Metal and hammering the fuck out his Game Boy at 3am through a fucking mahoosive sound system while his mother tries desperately to tear it out of his spasming hands.
This is an incredibly esoteric and deeply idiosyncratic album that draws as much from classic Aggrotech and Hardcore Techno and Drum and Bass and Power Electronics like Whitehouse as much as it does from chirps and squeaking from 8-bit game consoles. It’s a deeply psychologically disturbed wander through hellish nightmares where Mario is a feral, blood-stained cannibal, hungering for human flesh, and Bowser’s a homicidal maniac defending himself from hordes of cloned, psychotic Luigis who want his head for the terror suffered at his hands by Princess Peach, a wreck of her former self who cowers, utterly destroyed, in the corner of her cell, covered in her own filth as a last-gasp survival mechanism to try to stop the suffering she has endured for all these years at the hands (claws?) of Bowser and his son. Her dead eyes, yet still fierce and watchful in an emaciated, filthy face, register no human emotion anymore as her personality has locked itself away in a small, black, impenetrable box in the dead centre of her brain to preserve what little sanity she has left. The only noises she makes are grunts with no syllabification and she doesn’t even raise herself to look out of the windows at the explosions destroying the outer baileys of Bowser’s castle, remaining prostrate and limp and unresisting on the cold stone floor. It’s happened too many times before. The hope rising that rescue is blasting its way to her, only for her to be dragged, slack-jawed and defeated in mind and body to yet another cell, where Bowser’s rage will be scarred into her once beautiful flesh with white-hot talons and screaming red blood at the loss of yet another bastion. Every scar marks another move, every wound yet more rage and hatred but he still won’t release her, instead using her for his own pleasure over and over again. Her dress, now in rags, is a mere memory of the life and wealth she had before she was taken. The taffeta and silk are reduced to grey, blood and shit-stained tatters that barely covered mottled legs that were once comely, now lumpy and disfigured from so many ill-set breaks. The horrors of the Mario Kart contests don’t bear thinking about, as competitors are blown apart, landing on the tracks in welters of limbs and gore, or plummeting to their doom as they fall from the course and end up as splattered remnants when they hit the ground. The slaughter at the finish of each death race – where only the top three are spared and the rest are torn limb from limb and thrown to a hungry, bloodthirsty and baying crowd, all thanking their deities that it’s not them in that horror of a tourney. It is the kind of hell that a gamer would be consigned to…
This album, I shit you not, is a devastatingly effective record of someone descending into unrecoverable psychosis, someone who will not be brought back, no matter how much Temazepam you shove down their rigid, shrieking neck… It is over half an hour of gibbering, remorseless madness, the fizzing of shorting neurons, the stench of ozone as electrical arcs converge and earth themselves in human flesh, and the quickening of demonically possessed machines and their electronic noises getting ever louder and faster and reaching a crescendo as your tortured sanity finally gives up the ghost and the welcome embrace of black unconsciousness grips you.
In short, arottenbit is devilishly unhinged and more than a little terrifying. It’s Combichrist with the humanity ripped out of them and replaced with 8-bit processing and their language centres shorted out. It’s MASTER BOOT RECORD without any constraint or control left, just spitting out horror after aural horror without any form of restraint.
And there’s a cover of Slayer’s ‘Raining Blood’. I am going to say no more about this because it is something you will have to experience by yourself.
I shall leave the last word to arottenbit themselves: “Nuns, blastbeats, wrestling, dissonant melodies, satanism, exploding heads, speedcore, blasphemy, hardcore, sludge Game boy. In a word: POST-CHIPTUNE. A changing mix of all the influences that a city has to offer in its most violent days. The incredible Sister Margherita plays herself arm in arm with the Italian wrestling champion Red Scorpion, shaped by the wise hands of the guru of trash cinema DirtyTape. Slaps and explosions. Enjoy it”.
Enjoyment is, of course, a relative term. Just be grateful you survived it.
The Patented Dark Juan Blood Splat Rating System (Il sistema brevettato di classificazione degli schizzi di sangue di Dark Juan – Che cazzo c’è di sbagliato in voi gente se questo è il livello di follia nella forma musicale che l’Italia produce? Cos’è successo a tutti voi? Avete tutti bisogno di una terapia? Gesù, Maria e Giuseppe, per favore, inviate qualche aiuto per arottenbit…) awards arottenbit 450,000,000/10 for a record that amused and entertained and shit Dark Juan up like there is no tomorrow.
TRACKLISTING:
01. -_SPECIMEN_UNO_____(PROBE#1162011)
02. -_SPECIMEN_DUE_____(PROBE#1292011)
03. -_SPECIMEN_TRE_____(PROBE#1312011)
04. -_SPECIMEN_QUATTRO_(PROBE#1132010)
05. -_SPECIMEN_CINQUE__(PROBE#0542009)
06. -_SPECIMEN_SEI_____(PROBE#1262011)
07. -_SPECIMEN_SETTE___(PROBE#1012010)
08. -_SPECIMEN_OTTO____(PROBE#1082010)
09. -_SPECIMEN_NOVE____(PROBE#0532009)
10. -_SPECIMEN_ZERO____(PROBE#1642024) – (Slayer’s Raining Blood 8-bit cover)
LINE-UP:
arottenbit – Aural terrorism and slaughterhouse grooves
LINKS:
Disclaimer: This review is solely the property of Dark Juan and Ever Metal. It is strictly forbidden to copy any part of this review, unless you have the strict permission of both parties. Failure to adhere to this will be treated as plagiarism and will be reported to the relevant authorities.
