Pandemonium by Martinez/Roach

For fans of Asleep Country, Faust, The Caretaker, free jazz, and misreading random goings-on as pure tragedy, Pandemonium by Martinez/Roach forces us into an anxious, melancholic headspace through a portal of intense, immersive sound collage. Pulling from sources as diverse as nature sounds, progressive jazz, abstract poetry, and classical melodies, Martinez/Roach keeps our hairs on end as our paranoid gaze darts between these overwhelming stimuli. In the wake of emotional collapse, in the album’s case seemingly resulting from a romantic breakup, everything we experience preys on our further demise. From the art we consume to the conversations we entertain, all innocent input twists in our subconscious into further weapons for our own annihilation, as we find reflections of our pain, our loss, our past everywhere. The manic creative energy exploding off the tape on Pandemonium laughs along as our world makes a mockery of us, putting our lowest of lows on a jumbotron of obsessive memory and forcing us to watch this horror in perfect-quality slow-motion.