Music Box | Overlooked Albums | Converter

Mike Newmark Columnist

I went to an Autechre show a few years ago that completely changed my perception of live electronica. Instead of just playing back Untilted on gigantic speakers, Sean Booth and Rob Brown laid down a beat at a quick clip and mutated it for nearly four hours. We in the audience were little else but helpless bobble-head dolls, moving in time with the beat for the length of two feature films and not caring that melody never entered the equation.

That show got me thinking about the incredible endorphin-releasing power of beats, and I have to believe that this is what makes Converter’s utterly destructive Shock Front such a pleasurable experience. Ant-Zen was the only label dedicated to the brief “rhythmic noise” movement in industrial music, and Converter (a.k.a. Scott Sturgis from Seattle, Wash.) saw the movement’s aesthetic to fruition. Sturgis is the less afraid than his contemporaries of sticking to one idea and using volume as a weapon, yet he knows his software and has a deft ear for syncopation. So even though Shock Front is rhythmic noise in the extreme, it’s twisted and idiosyncratic enough to avoid monotony and remain stimulating after dozens of plays. I surmise that Ant-Zen was happy with the results.

Shock Front still kicks butt today because of its insistence on staying emotionally neutral. It’s metal machine music, driven by blasted technoid beats, rumbling passages of noise and asphyxiated screeches. Sturgis seems too enamored with creating the perfect rhythm and hearing his system go haywire to try freaking you out with any of the dystopian melodies—that have caused so much ’90s industrial to go stale. Shock Front’s emotional neutrality has the added effect of making it seem as though you could wield it, move with it, instead of letting it hold you prisoner. It would be an admittedly awful soundtrack for exploring your own headspace, but a fantastic one for running sprints or going head-to-head with the punching bag.

Converter’s subsequent release, Blast Furnace (2000), continued in this vein, but Shock Front is the superior record because it contains more winning single moments. The midsection of “Denogginizer” is an aural approximation of a Godzilla battle, the machine-gun fire giving way to the earth-shaking stomps of the enormous beast itself. “Coma” is a dance track played on blown-out speakers and wrecked electronic equipment, though you’ll only hear it in the blackest of clubs. However, the crown jewel of Sturgis’s career is the massive, awe-inspiring title track. A monstrous trudge effortlessly morphs into an explosive drum ‘n’ bass workout, and when it redlines near the end it can be exhilarating, hitting with the force of a sledgehammer and the precision of a machete. Those looking for something to bring the noise but hate metal’s histrionics and noise-rock’s snarkiness can now line up before Shock Front and get their fix.