- A friend described this LP as "Auschwitz techno" and, in doing so, chanced upon an epithet fitting of In a Realized Luck of Immanence in more ways than one. In fact, looking at Ben Gibson's MySpace, with its white noise background, and his chosen artwork for the release—a sketchy, frosty, cracked, black and white abstract—the epithet doesn't seem that far off the wall. Just as Auschwitz conjures a sense of terror, bleakness and desolation, so do the sounds of Ben Gibson's debut. These vacant wastelands of sound, with their scattered chaos and secretions of metallic hue, are not of the sort I would want to go dance to in a club but, at the right time, and when in the right mood, are fucking arresting.
There's no escaping the word "apocalyptic" when describing this LP, nor any way of stopping yourself from thinking about the opening scenes of the Terminator films when listening to it. Helping to elicit those responses are random bass kills and broken, scattered crackles (of the sort you get when speaker wires aren't connected properly), which are scattered throughout. But, even so, the album starts in comparatively high spirits, the bump and grind underbelly of opener "Blah Blah Relations to Whatever" off-set with a piercing and ethereal beam shot through it from above.
Then things get dark: Heavy iron gates slamming shut pepper crunky track "My Ethics Are Crucial," while prison alarm bells ring out over the hurried minimalism of "Vanished Between." Gibson's unwavering vision of the future also includes two tracks of tottering techstep: one at usual dubstep pace, one underpinned by a near constant bass noise, such is the frequency of its repetition.
"Wirklichkeit" is a disorientating stomp through an obliterated world—its glitches, clunks and crunches sound like machines desecrating the last memory of man as they eventually overpower a sombre, fading organic hum, taking the last traces of anything non-robotic, non-mechanical with them. That may sound dramatic but, well, it is. Imagine a less humanistic, more desecrated soundscape than Ben Klock's One, and you'll have your ear pressed against the world Gibson so ably documents with this album: It's like he's actually been to the end of time, recorded it, returned and then stuck it on CD.
Tracklist01. Wirklichkeit
02. Blah Blah Relations
03. Vanished Between
04. Plurals of Good
05. Same Symptoms, Same Combat – Scene 1
06. My Ethics are Crucial
07. Same Symptoms, Same Combat – Scene 2