One of the most meaningful and brilliant crossbreed between electroacoustic music and metacultural reflection on life under neo-liberal monstrosities, where it's quite clear that amplified truths in the name of the holy capital are nothing but blinding lies while keeping a personality or so-called critical awareness is almost a privileged state of being, came from Goteborg-based label Fang Bomb and got signed by Glasgow-based composer Paul Baran - it's not a moniker for some electronic music project taken from the inventor of Internet! -, who wove ten impressive sonic reflections/refractions around the concept of alterity or otherness, which should be regarded from the symbolic and psychological viewpoints filtered by flickering moments where perception of reality meets a sort of inverted rapture. The sound on "The Other" that his wise author fittingly linked with Britain, student protests, riots, Neo Liberalism, fear, nationalism, Haiti, chess, geopolitical sum games, Potlatch, celebrities, Obama, Shoah, love, Reflexive Impotence, the Wheel, inversion, Tarkovsky's The Zone, is less influenced by dark-jazz sonorities (Bohren und Der Club Of Gore, Dale Cooper and so on), even if there some moments when those influences resurfaces. The sinister squeaks and a sort of heartbeat whose rising pace and distorsion seems to mirror the growing disquiet and fear of our age on the opening track "Time" and the drunk limerick-like words from Obama's speeches about Holocaust by Paul over the estranging laptop-generated poltergeists by Sebastian Lexer and the heart-rending quartet of Sarah Whiteside's cello and the violins of Sylvia Hallett, Sasanna Ferrar and Alison Blunt on the evocative "Himmelstrasse" perfectly tunes listener's mood: the following "Dissent" where Paul inserted recordings from protesting students before repeating like a gawping "Beating the barricade" reminded an image I have on a t-shit I bought in UK with a picture of Smiley-masked police anti-riot squad wishing "Have a nice day!" while the really evocative sonic portrait of UK by the above-mentioned string quartet and the electronic grasps and the programmed drums by Gordon Kennedy on "Britonia" renders the portrayed object better than other similar portraits; the obscure mantle of distorsions and electric sparks which wraps the instrumental parts by Axel Doerner (trumpet), Werner Dafeldecker (double bass) and Richard Craig (flute) on "Celebrity" tears the veil of golden patina out by a brilliant Debord-ian reflection on the ephemeral consistency of the society of the spectacle which precedes the voodoo-like percussive track "The Human Republic Of Haiti" where Paul meaningfully hits a fire extinguisher on the fragmented structures and fragmented piano by Sebastian Lexer, the soothingly disquieting fake idyll by Sarah Whiteside's cello, micro piano melodies and life support-like artificial breath that Paul extracted from a VCS3 on "Krom" and the borderline post-industrial suite of "Time Zone", inspired by Tarkowski's The Zone; the lopsided classical hamronies of "Looking For Bobby", which got inspred the troubled chess player Bobby Fischer, and the withering atmosphere of the final "Potlach" ends an album which could be the perfect soundtrack for the ominuous decaying of humanity which seems to mark our century.