With a name like IX and album entitled 6EQUJ5 that clocks in at two hours this isn’t a band aiming at being on Jools Holland at any point.
Instead of wanting intrusive boogie-woogie splattered all over their work, IX, with evocative titles such as ‘Fennyman’s Point’ and ‘Sub Level 5’ are more interesting in taking the listeners to faraway places.
6EQUJ5 is a rainy neon lit world fed through the visions of The Radiophonic Workshop (‘Incubation (Phase 1)’ and Blade Runner (‘Monad Theme Reprise’). This isn’t just a place of dank synth atmospherics though; life emerges in heady sweaty nightclubs where thumping Chemical Brothers dance music, itchy drum n bass antics, Talking Heads style rhythm guitars and much more shepherd you to ecstasy.
The title track almost reaches the beauty of the soundtrack to Manhunter, while ‘Black Pyramid (Part 2)’ oscillates around a Tangerine Dream ambient soundscape of splitting atoms, then it’s deep ambient all the way into the ketamine sucking second half. And is that a melodica on ‘Dome 1’?
The pitch was the album is the soundtrack to a movie. It’s not, at 2 hours it’s longer than most good movies. This is the soundtrack to a sci-fi city, and not even the city in Blade Runner, this is more like Futurama, in which multitudes of people live colourful, diverse lives. IX have created a truly sprawling world. And whilst Bandcamp is awash in music of this type, very little of it is either as ambitious as IX, or as immaculately conceived, realised and presented.
Like taking a trip through the night life of G-Police.
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