Available on: Blackest Ever Black LP

This is a record so stunningly devoid of flesh and blood that it’s almost impossible to imagine it being sculpted by human hands, even if they are intensely in collaboration with machines.

The hands in question belong to Stuart Argabright and Shinichi Shimokawa, who recorded as Black Rain from 1989 to 1998 and who are now rebooting the project out of renewed interest. In its original incarnation, Black Rain was formed as a post-industrial, post-punk five-piece, who ended up supporting the infamous G. G. Allin on his final NYC gig. It’s an intriguing coupling: G.G. Allin (christened Jesus Christ Allin, so let’s face it, from the get-go you’re unlikely to be chasing a career in banking), saw himself as the last authentic rock ‘n’ roller and lived an appropriately lawless and entirely anarchic life. It’s tempting to view his death that night from an accidental overdose as a symbolic destruction of the notion of physical pursuits in the face of the rise of the machines. Anyway, the five-piece shed skins and eventually became a duo, responsible for all the material originally released under the Black Rain moniker.

The material on Now I’m Just a Number is culled from the 1.0 album originally released on the DC based label, Fifth Colvnm Records. The music had been commissioned by Robert Longo for his somewhat disastrous 1995 cinematic reworking of William Gibson’s Neuromoancer, Jonny Mnemonic. The seven tracks presented here were selected by Blackest Ever Black [full disclosure: run by FACT’s Kiran Sande], remastered and re-sequenced as a mini-album of sorts. The label has nailed an almost pathologically precise atmosphere of exploratory doom over a series of releases and are not treating this as a reissue as such. This makes perfect sense really, with Black Rain sounding like the demon seed that precipitated the birth of the label.

And the sound is basically staggering. The Black Rain sound, as represented here, is extremely stark, vague layers of doom-drenched synth-drone underpinned by an efficient techno thud and intricate layers of electronic percussion. In what is an incredibly delicate balancing act, nothing is wasted, not a note or a second; every sound and texture is unobtrusive but somehow crushingly oppressive. Tension is generated through the emergence and disappearance of layers of sound without any real narrative progression – this is a cold repetition that is nevertheless in constant fluctuation – constant and sophisticated mechanical motion without progression emphasising the hopeless atmosphere within.

At times this is barely even music. For seven minutes at a pace of Absolute Zero, “Night City.Tokyo” juxtaposes opening gates, footsteps, pouring rain, occasional cavernous rhythmic crashes and a barely perceptible fluctuating drone that could match Sunn 0))) for apocalyptic atmosphere. The occasional vocal sample that does manifest itself sounds like the like dead TV broadcasts running on a loop or the burnt-out remains of the blimps that hover over the Los Angeles imagined by Ridley Scott in Blade Runner. It’s by no means all stasis though: ‘Lo Tek Bridge’, in two variations, rushes at an anxious pace with synthetic feedback hinting at encroaching danger, actually sounding like Vangelis’ end titles to that landmark piece of cinema devoid of all melody and humanity. This is a world overrun with Replicants barren of emotions and memories, fake or otherwise. It’s remarkable just how subtly Argabright and Shimokawa have been able to express such apocalyptic nihilism, how the barest functionality can take on such an over-powering presence. I’m put in mind of A Guy Called Gerald at his most futuristic (Black Secret Technology and the brilliant and under-rated Proto Acid: The Berlin Sessions) where everything is either actual rhythm or the foundation for rhythm; the title track deftly interweaves all these aforementioned strands across nearly 12 minutes of robot voodoo.

Remorselessly cold, Now I’m Just a Number gives further evidence, as if it were needed, that Stuart Argabright is a producer and visionary beyond compare, not just for his work here and with Ike Yard, but for Death Comet Krew, Bi-Connicals of the Rammellzee, Dominatrix and others, standing alongside Cut Hands, Roly Porter and more as music for the end of times.

Jonny Mugwump