This tape from late 2009 cunningly combines space-pop artwork, anything-goes mash-up collocations and a playful sense of humour. The myspace site claims that it’s a solo project hailing from Tennessee, and while the tape’s peculiar blend of techno, pop, hiphop, tape experimentation and noise was too much for me on the first listens, the tape has grown on me, to the extend that it has revealed some real, albeit utterly impossible pop gems. “The Power and the Gory”, for example, shreds a the most basic of techno beats and feeds it to hints of wicked electropop synths, all to strangely mesmerizing effect. It’s not until the spoken word samples come and give in to some harsh noise that you realize that this might be Atari Teenage Riot for the bedroom tape market. An insight which, again, is immediately erased by the threateningly effective bass and nintendo melodies of a decidedly urban hiphop number (“Now Hit Tha Booty Do (Stankylegremix)”). Later on, Kelis’s “Milkshake” is given a Terror’ish treatment that, for all it’s noisyness, will force the melody firmly into your head. All the tracks mentioned are on the b-side, which indicates that I find it more difficult to relate to the five a-side tracks (with the exception of the, uh, hypnotic “Club Stance”).

Whatever s/he does, Terror’ish clearly knows what s/he’s doing and does it well. I like this for the music, not for its humoristic value. While I’m not sure if this really works as dance music in any serious context, this obscure mix of – I’m quoting the myspace here again – “ noise / harshhouse / breakcore / ambient / deathsounds / rocknroll/ improv / funcore” has the potential to sit nicely between DJ Yo-Yo Dieting and Josh Lay in your tape collection. A missing link I had never been aware of. 7/10 -- Jan-Arne Sohns (17 February, 2010)