Techno Animal: still the most seismic matter in the universe
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September 11, 2001, Techno Animal’s industrial hip hop masterpiece was not particularly well-timed. In every other respect, The Brotherhood Of The Bomb was a work of prescient genius.
One of many projects with Godflesh legend Justin Broadrick in cahoots with Kevin Martin, aka The Bug, Techno Animal had already made the mother of all cosmic trip hop records with 1995’s major label behemoth Re-Entry, but this was a far more radical endeavour. Built upon a series of grotesque and distorted beats, and with an army of underground MCs spitting fire, these songs were far too weird and gnarly for the mainstream rap crowd, but too firmly entrenched in hip hop culture to immediately convince the noise brigade. But therein lies the brilliance of absurdly heavy boom-bap assaults like Cruise Mode 101 and Hypertension; TA were always militantly genre-averse and seemed cantankerous enough to often be pushing boundaries out of sheer spite.