Album review: Martine Chine - Urbit Chaos. Uncompromising meditative brutality.
Martine Chine - Urbit Chaos
In an era where experimental music often fractures into micro-genres and algorithm-friendly bite-sized compositions, Martine Chine arrives with a defiant middle finger to contemporary attention spans. Urbit Chaos, her debut offering on the reliably adventurous Attenuation Circuit imprint, presents itself as a singular 45-minute statement—one track, one journey, one uncompromising vision that refuses to be parsed into digestible fragments.
Emerging from France's fertile underground, Chine operates in that liminal space where drone's meditative expanses collide with harsh noise's confrontational brutality. This isn't the polite ambient wandering of new age compilations, nor is it the performative extremity of power electronics posturing. Instead, Urbit Chaos inhabits a more complex emotional geography—one where serenity and violence coexist in an uneasy détente.
The album's title hints at digital dystopia, perhaps nodding to the decentralized computing platform Urbit, but any technological themes dissolve into something more primal as the piece unfolds. What begins as a barely perceptible hum gradually accumulates mass and malevolence, like watching storm clouds gather in real-time. Chine's compositional patience is remarkable; she allows each textural shift to breathe and evolve organically, never rushing toward climax or resolution.
The sonic palette draws from both organic and synthetic sources, creating an ambiguous landscape where it becomes impossible to distinguish between processed field recordings and carefully sculpted electronic drones. There are moments of surprising beauty—sustained tones that shimmer like heat mirages—but they're always undercut by an underlying current of unease. When the harsh noise elements eventually surface, they feel inevitable rather than shocking, like discovering that the beautiful stranger you've been following has led you into a dark alley.
Chine's control over dynamics is particularly impressive for a debut. She understands that true power in experimental music comes not from volume alone, but from the careful modulation of tension and release. The piece breathes with an almost biological rhythm, expanding and contracting in ways that feel simultaneously planned and spontaneous. This organic quality sets her apart from the more clinical approaches that often plague the drone scene.
For listeners familiar with Attenuation Circuit's catalog—a label that has consistently championed the intersection of academic rigor and visceral impact—Urbit Chaos fits perfectly within their aesthetic mandate while carving out distinctly personal territory. Chine joins a lineage that includes artists who understand noise as more than mere aggression and drone as more than mere stasis.
At 45 minutes, the album demands complete surrender to its internal logic. This isn't background music or meditative wallpaper; it's an active listening experience that rewards patience and punishes distraction. In our fractured media landscape, such commitment feels almost radical. Chine has created something that exists outside the attention economy—a work that operates on its own temporal terms and refuses to accommodate our diminished capacity for sustained focus.
Urbit Chaos announces Martine Chine as an artist uninterested in compromise or commercial viability. In a scene often dominated by academic theorising or adolescent provocation, she offers something rarer: genuine sonic exploration guided by both emotional intelligence and technical sophistication. This is experimental music that actually experiments, pushing into territories that feel genuinely uncharted rather than merely rehashing established transgressive gestures.
For adventurous listeners willing to submit to its demanding architecture, Urbit Chaos offers rewards that extend far beyond its 45-minute runtime. It's the kind of album that lingers in your nervous system long after the speakers fall silent—a phantom limb of sound that restructures how you hear the world around you.
Rating: 9/10
OUT IN OCTOBER:
https://www.attenuationcircuit.de/
ALL THE MARTINE CHINE LINKS:
https://linktr.ee/martine.chine.band
WATCH THE ALBUM TEASER:
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