Adult

Detroit duo Adult. (Nicola Kuperus and Adam Lee Miller) have made it clear what their 9th album, ‘Becoming Undone’, album is all about. A techno-sonic summary and assessment of the structural (internal and external, engineered or otherwise) collapses of the last two years. If darkness prevails then we need the necessary interpreters and articulators to guide us to the light. Twenty-three years in and that’s what Adult. perennially provide: electronic disembody music.

Miller’s raison d’etre is blunt: “We weren’t interested in melody or harmony since we didn’t see the world having that” whereas for Kuperus her withering take on the ruins of civilisation and its ignorant inhabitants is both depressingly accurate and a clarion call:
“Humans have always been pretty terrible … but every year the compromises of culture just accelerate.” Art is all we have to navigate our ways though the prescriptive paranoia and restrictive ennui. From destitution appears restitution. Fall apart and reassemble.

As chaos and confusion reigns and malevolence sought (and still seeks) to make further nefarious gains, the group’s creative sparks draw inspiration from the psychic violence meted out on a daily basis. That said, Adult. have never needed the parapsychological manoeuvring of a global imprism-ment to observe the abscesses, processes and recesses of the dis-eased souls of society. Reality bites … back.

Channelling (be)musings into another exemplary electro-essay of a decaying, decrepit society replete with the blissfully ignorant, complete with the wilfully belligerent, blindly and blithely following and adhering to all and any edict with nary a dissenting thought. The weak shall disinherit the Earth.

Eight tracks of discombobulated disco(r)dance, spiritually depth-charged, ritually death-enlarged, introspective, affective, effective, the boundaries of self-identity colliding with the quandaries of self-loathing, all that’s left behind an empty husk gazing from afar. The body is a cage and the inner-workings a relentless routine of longing and not-belonging, an endless search for eternal meaning amidst an infernal wait for expiry. Death succumbs us.

Kuperus once more effortlessly and artfully evokes Siouxsie Sioux’s ominous, luminous stalking presence, hectoring with heavy heart, refashioning passion and laying down (c)laws. Miller’s mechanical metronomic pulses, art-beats and tranceformative terrains trick the mind into taking leave from the corpus. A freeing of being.