PSUDOKU - "DEEP SPACE PSUDOKUMENT" LP

The jaunty conceit behind Psudoku, a one-man studio band from Trondheim in Norway, is that it’s what happened to that one man’s other band Parlamentarisk Sodomi when “a rift in the space-time continuum” caused him to hurtle into the future. So where Parlamentarisk Sodomi is fairly rote dirty grindcore business, Psudoku pinballs all over the shop, with jazz fusion, brutal prog and math-metal tropes ejaculated forth at grind-and-then-some tempo. Deep Space Psudokument requires intensive gerrymandering and an expert genre lawyer to be allowed in a punk reviews column, but Steinar Kittilsen, the one man behind both bands, has paid his dues at the grindstone. This, the third Psudoku album, contains wit, finesse and grandeur, but is rarely less than evisceratingly intense. ‘KcultraVIII8000’ (all the tracks have these sort of sub-Autechre titles) has something of Orthrelm about its machine-gun repetition; ‘hq[LQ]’ is what Dillinger Escape Plan’s Calculating Infinity sounded like when its eventual audience of vaguely restless Korn fans heard it for the first time. Previous LP Planetarisk Sudoku had a bit more overt Rock In Opposition steez about it, but it still lurks inside ‘ZpRNVphNtz’ and ‘KOSMISQUE_trapp’, just cubically mangled by a trash compactor and kicked down a mountain. Located at the point where Discordance Axis and MXLX meet, Deep Space Psudokument is an extraordinary testament to singular obsession. Additionally, its streaming page gives the release date as New Year’s Eve 2037, and while I have my doubts about whether grind will actually evolve into this, I share Bandcamp’s optimism about still being operational two decades hence. [Noel Gardner, The Quietus]