| Fans of author Neal Stephenson will recognize the name behind Phillip Thomson’s breackcore act, The Nam Shub Of Enki. In Stephenson’s cyberpunk novel Snowcrash, the author popularizes ancient Sumerian mythologies regarding language. In the original myth, the god Enki changed human language from one to many, leaving people unable to effectively communicate. This resulted in confusion throughout the world.
With his deranged breaks and jumbled samples, Thomson, like Enki, unleashes a wave of audio chaos to confound his listeners. Destroy Everything is Similar to Jason Forest’s Cock Rock Discostyle of breakcore, with its “everything but the kitchen sink” approach to sampling. Thomson moves from glitch to jungle to hard trance to gabba to a number of other electronic subgenres without ever slowing down enough to commit to one.
The byproduct of such variation is unavoidable; Destroy Everything occasionally wanders too far and gets lost in its own excesses. “Louisiana Whores”, for example, trips over itself in its attempt to lay down the next break. And the harsh feedback of “Untitled” doesn’t necessarily coincide with the vocal samples laid throughout.
However, the frantic mix of sounds succeeds more than it fails. Look at the album’s first three tracks. On the first song, entitled “The Prisoner”, Snog/Black Lung mastermind David Thrussell lends his whispery throat while guest guitarist Chucknee adds some melody to Thomson’s driving beats. From here, “Bleed” takes over on a wave of industrial beats and hard electronics. The third track, “Corruption” introduces itself with a light, tribal rhythm which is soon trampled by heavy pounding noise. These three tracks exhibit such a range in style that by the time track 5, “KiKi Theme”, launches itself off a bed of Middle Eastern sampling, the listener is hardly surprised. The dissimilarity between tracks, in a sense, gives the album a kind of rugged flow.
Another string that hold the Destroy Everything together is Thomson’s use of vocal samples. The album is peppered with humorous, and often vulgar, voices to add a theme of dark playfulness. The vocal clips in “Coldrock” are so unapologetically kitschy that even the most conservative listener will cross her/his fingers to mimic devil horns. “Deemed Offensive” cuts a series of common English obscenities that are rhythmically linked in a way that is as fun as it is outrageous. The song “Vixns”, with its hilarious film clips, plays a similar game. This track will inspire many b-movie fans to weed through their DVD collections in search of their favorite soft porn.
Films, electronics, beats, feedback, samples, vocals, remixes; this album goes everywhere. The Nam Shub Of Enki’s delivers a dizzying array of sounds, and it does it in a way that works. Thomsom gives himself the freedom to let music take him where he wants without restrictions while he gives his listeners the opportunity to joyfully get lost in the chaos. Reviewed
by: Richie Corelli
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