FERRARO, JAMES - Multitopia

"New album from James Ferraro of The Skaters/Lamborghini Crystal et al, the first run ever presented under his own name. Multitopia is our reality system, James writes in the liner notes. A post 9/11 reality technology in between the frames of data reception. A cross wire into new head and necessary evolution upon the impact of the towers. It feels like a major work from James, the first fully-conceived album to go beyond his initial brain-fried 1980s nightmare culture documentation, reconciling both dystopian and utopian mindsets in a vision of Pan as Multitopia. Body modification, the blurring of sexual persona (via cracked images of James on the back with a modified pair of breasts chilling next to an arcade game) and cyborg intelligences are all recurrent tropes in James work but here he explodes them all, with some of the most aggressively nuanced keyboard and drum work of his entire career, kicking off with a full kit sound that sits somewhere between industrial steel drums and chaos pads then building to an evocative peak that then dissolves into wave after wave of fluxing keyboard drone and oddly looped vocal fragments. The gravity of the music is truly omnivorous, devouring drone, punk, new wave, industrial and minimal synth modes and spitting them back out as intensely detailed black and white visions of the future now. James somehow manages to interweave vacuous TV announcements and cheap anchor man quips alongside the lucid, microtone rich keyboard work, situating the whole deal in a virtual, godless netherworld with each track a further descent into hell. It is both beautiful and horrifying. A major work from James - no one is doing anything remotely like him. Highly recommended. -- David Keenan. Remastered version of the CD-R release on New Age Discs. Limited edition of 425 copies. Color printed covers. Dedicated to Zac Davis." -Olde English Spelling Bee