If he hadn’t dedicated himself to music, Mic Irmer would probably have made for an excellent surgeon: Splicing apart creative arteries to drain them of oxygen-deficient blood, brutally breaking beat-bones to suck out their artistic marrow, powering up tired pumps with propulsive pacemakers and lovingly sowing together the freshly energised composition in the studio is still his favourite activity when not expounding on the technical background to production in his very own “Synthesizer Magazin” or shooting award-winning experimental films.

That’s where the comparison ends, though. The “Digital Anatomist Project”, in any case, stays free from overly clinical incisions, as though someone had turned up an Industrial Metal album during an otherwhise perfectly professional open heart operation. Irmer prefers the sources to his sounds to remain unanymous, but he never wants them to be faceless facades, fostering a mulitude of association and injecting metaphorical content into otherwhise cooly crafted and proficiently precise tectonic stuctures.

No wonder, then, that the album, despite its thoroughly coherent timbral surface, oozes diversity in arrangement, approach, instrumentation and mood. Intermittantly sounding like Dubstep without steps, Dub without Echo, Drum n Bass with harmonies, Krautrock with balls, psyched-up Electro, a Rock band playing Breakbeats or an Industrial performance act interpreting Jazz standards, it never shies away from comparisons, only to crush them under the pleasantly eclectic weight of its momentous basses and dauntless drum shuffles.

After an intense opening section of aggressively pumping tunes, the “Digital Anatomist Project” takes a sudden and rewarding turn for more atmospheric shores with two ambitious pieces scraping at the ten-minute mark: “Blurred Faces” fluently serpentines through shardes of broken glass on a simmering slow-groove and shifting textures of luminescent melodic structures, while the drilling noises and subtle string pastures of the epic “Amoebatrons” undergo a seemless metamorphosis half-way, transforming into a hypnotic walk through a solitary chamber of warm resonances, which fizzles out into a spacey afterthought.

The fact that these acurately drafted and intruigingly programmed pieces are framed by a quirky bassdance (“Nichtsdestotrotz”) and a nervous, yet playful Jungle-fantasy (“Die Scheinwelt Maschine”) speaks books. As dark and frightening as some of the tracks can get at times, they never loose a boyish charm, which points towards an irrepressable desire to try out new things and leave downtrodden paths. Both in terms of medical safety and artistic reward, it may be a good thing after all that Mic Irmer decided opting against a career as a surgeon.

By Tobias Fischer

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