Dos Asmund : Technokrat

6

OUT OF 10

Dos Asmund is not an act that I would describe as pretentious but as ambitious and one with one too many influences hanging on their sleeves. While that can be jolly and all it can also be extremely overwhelming for the casual listener which is why instead of going through each and every single categorical listing Dos Asmund provided for each song, I’m going to instead describe each song as I see fit without referring to the notes provided. After all every listen will be different for every single soul on the planet so might as well interpret the works as you want to; fuck what everyone else thinks and all that rebel jazz that comes with it.

What you do need to know is that Dos Asmund makes a lot of electronic music and that this album has been getting slammed by a hammer in the smithy for years. Now it’s here at the start of January in the lovely year of 2025 and we get to indulge in all its instrumental grace. Let’s have a crack at it.

Monolith is the song that begins the album and you would be fooled into thinking this was going to be a cinematic masterpiece based on the spine-tingling noise drop that occurs at the beginning of the song only to be introduced to what I would consider a rather mediocre electronic beat with a bit of italo-disco influence. The noisy industrial elements are there for sure in the wall-of-noise-kind-of-way during what would be the chorus but it doesn’t add to the song just detracts from it. Its not a horrible song by any means necessary but it certainly isn’t something I would consider a masterpiece.

I would say that the statements from the previous paragraph translate into my thoughts for the whole album. There are a ton of varying electronic beats on “Technokrat” from the electro vibes felt on Obéir with its robotic vocals and what not to the analog presence of ‘Dirt and Circuits’ but my hairs never stand on the back of my neck throughout the run of this album nor do my senses perk up.

To counteract that point and give Dos Asmund some points for their creativity there are a lot of elements that I do appreciate on Technokrat. Such as the clicking sound effects from Carambolage De Sons versus what sounds like R2D2 beatboxing for the sake of beatboxing. As if the only way to rescue Han Solo from Jabba’s barge was to create a lo-fi track from one of those YouTube playlists and he absolutely nailed the ideology and freed his boy without much more than a calculated compute.

But then again I’m let down by other songs such as Radiation which wants to be a Eurodance song but can’t even live up to the hype that Vitas got all those years ago for his strange futuristic tongue yodeling that people made fun of and then came to realize they loved later on. And the same can be said for ‘The Probe’ which echoes so many nineties dance tunes without the flair or pizazz to back it up and whether or not you used to hate it you can’t deny that there’s a nostalgic nerve that hits whenever you crank up the beats of those thirty-some-old year songs nowadays.

Technokrat is a fun listen to say the very least but the amount of influences it wears on its sleeves makes me pine for something other than this album. The industrial beats just make me want to listen to a modern bands in the same vein and the Eurodance inclusions make me want to backtrack to something cheesy from yesteryear rather than maintaining focus on this album for something that’s particular greater than the sum of Dos Asmund’s effort. I wouldn’t say I’m being too harsh on Technokrat as there are elements that shine in the end but there’s certainly a fistful of albums that influenced this that I’d rather listen to tenfold.

Steven Gullotta

https://brutalresonance.com/
Editor-in-Chief. Been writing for this site since 2012. Worked my way up to the top now I can't be stopped. I love industrial and dark electronic music which is why I'm so critical of it.

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Brutal Resonance began in Sweden in 2009 by founder Patrik Lindstrom. The website quickly rose to prominence in the underground electronic scene by covering the likes of industrial, synthpop, EBM, darkwave, dark ambient, synthwave, and many, many other genres.

Brutal Resonance has since grown to be one of the more well established blogs covering both established and renowned artists with an emphasis on harsh honesty and critique.

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