Freewave Manifesto by JS666 is undeniably the most destructive record I’ve ever heard. It’s an album that’s as concerned with creating chaos as it is making sense of that chaos; tearing apart music into shrapnel and trying to reconstruct the shredded pieces back into something that resembles a cohesive thought. It’s a perverse sonic jigsaw puzzle of sorts. Not only does it eviscerate music, though, it openly mocks it, stripping voices of their melodies and throwing them into a field of disjointed noise and explosions.
For all of its horror, though, there’s something that’s inherently comforting about the record. Being able to pick out random moments of melody and structural beauty is a release, an oasis in the midst of what is otherwise a rather dire landscape. As such, it’s a difficult record to cope with and one that has to be endured for a time before these moments begin to reveal themselves more fully. Don’t be fooled by the album’s opener, “aleatronic exercise 1” as it’s beautifully sliced layers and logical melody are not to be repeated on the record.
This record is not comforting. But given time, it’s actually far more humanizing than it might originally reveal.
The Modern Things 