13. Techno AnimalThe Brotherhood Of The Bomb
My memory of this record was being afraid to break the stereo because I wanted to turn it up as loud as it would go. Obviously, there’s a lot of low-end content in the record but it was one of those things that needed to be heard loud. We would listen to this and leave all of the doors that connected everything in the house open so that it could just travel through the whole house. That feeling of wanting to be enveloped by the physicality of this record was really potent and it demanded that.
Like many of the other records on the list, it wasn’t easily contained within its genre, because it didn’t really have an existing context. It created a context. It’s the somewhat unacknowledged predecessor to a lot of things now. I think I would have enjoyed it not knowing who was involved because it spoke to me on a lot of levels. I was really into a lot of indie hip hop at that time. There was the whole Def Jux record label. El-P and his production was definitely similar to what Kevin [Richard Martin aka The Bug] and Justin were doing with Techno Animal. New York was close by so there was some awareness of what was going on with that really hard-edged, rugged, and raw form of hip-hop and then Justin and Kevin combining some aesthetics from their backgrounds of industrial and metal. Those elements aren’t obvious, necessarily, but they’re there in terms of the level of aggression, use of distortion, and the bleak nature of the music. It was very much not party music.
Broadrick and Kevin had both been inspirational to me for a long period of time because they came from this world of punk and metal and then went in very different directions with different projects. I love this idea of people that can’t be contained within one world because their interests are too broad and too passionate to just be funnelled through one narrow channel.
I never got to see Techno Animal, but I remember hearing about the shows where they had these massive sound systems and would try to play in pitch black with smoke and strobes. Just full physicality. And that demand for physicality clearly came through even on the record because I wanted to play it so loud.
