By MC Galang
Taiwanese producer Lujiachi’s “Teiichi” is a beast of a trip: it’s not some nefarious entity that lurks in a corner, it attacks and impales everything in its way. It’s also electrifying as it is unsettling—both existing in a jarring spectrum of industrial punk and Detroit techno on steroids. It propulses wildly, like arterial blood spurting from an avulsion wound: grotesque, yet at that moment, life spindles aggressively until it is no more.
Industrial music is often steeped in existentialist and/or nihilistic themes: think Kyle Cooper’s iconic title sequence for David Fincher’s Se7en featuring a Coil remix of Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer.” “Teiichi” is no different. While stylistically, it projects impersonal structures (machines and automated atmospheres), it has an acute intuition for sound-designing polar extremes: dread and mania.
Lujiachi describes his transition to producing electronic music from being in a band (Taipei-based psychedelic drone metal duo 破地獄 Scattered Purgatory) as “divergent to [its] tranquilizing soundscape” but retaining its “overarching ritualistic and tribal ambiance.” These manifest in less pedantic terms: completely in-your-face and unsparing, though I get what he meant. “Teiichi” has no interest in vagueness, it only intends to disarm and absorb. This rings (trills) true for the rest of his excellent 0 EP (“What? You search? You would multiply yourself by ten, by a hundred? You seek followers? Seek zeros! – Friedrich Nietzsche) which is by no means an “easy listen” but who wants that? People riding elevators?
Stream Teiichi
