21.09.18

For the best part of a decade, DJ, producer, and record label owner Ron Morelli has been probing deep into the darker reaches of the dance music spectrum, with his imprint L.I.E.S. responsible for some of the most abrasive – and often awesome – club records around.

The tough-talking New Yorker’s own output is no less caustic, as his trio of LPs for Domnick Fernow’s Hospital Productions attests. Disappearer, the follow-up to clanking, churning, corrosive A Gathering Together sees Morelli on typically disgusting form, bludgeoning his way through an hour’s worth of noise skree and avant-EBM skronk with predictably punishing results.

Though it can occasionally veer into the teenage – Golden Oldies, in particular, is the tired sound of an adolescent revenge fantasy that’s the result of too many watches of Driller Killer and a few Wolf Eyes albums – there’s enough material on Disappearer that is genuinely disquieting and disturbing to consider it a nasty, repugnant, success. Material like the underwater body horror of Re-Runs, and the title track’s Voices From the Lake-meets-Whitehouse is Morelli at his malignant best; he makes broken music for broken people in broken times.

Josh Baines