Scottish techno label got out of my radar for a long time, due to the plenty of releases for new and old labels and artists that regularly saturates the grid, but I'm glad it traces a route by the new album (their sixth one) by Slam, the well-known duo consisting of Stuart McMillan and Orde Meikle, who founded the label as an offshoot of their intense activity as techno party organizers. Less "vaporous" but likewise obscure than their previous album "Reverse Proceed", "Machine Cut Noise" comes with the declaration about the primary source of inspiration by their forgers, who said it's going to explore "the everyday workings of what makes us human" and got mostly composed in and inspired by hotspots of mass transportation and transit such as airports, train stations, and hotels they visited during their frequent globetrotting. The "human" element got supposedly mirrored by moments where the sound seems to render the humanely (entirely justified) grave concern and rising fear of being just a gear of a large and seemingly chaotic mechanism. The rising digital brass and the piercing whisper over the first storm of mechanical beats in "Viginti Quinque", the ghostly kind of choirs grasped in the emptiness dug by square-shaped sequences and whirling electronic punches of "Ecclesiastic", the likewise ghostly entity (sounding like a dilution of the sound that precedes an announcement about some departing train in a station) smoothing the relentless step of "Evite", the sonic particles slowly flowing in the chaotic order of the rhythmical pattern in "Obstacle" are just some samples of such a bipolarity. This output is nothing revolutionary against some of their previous releases, but it could be considered a sort of maintenance task on the already stable tunnel joining Berlin and Detroit techno sonorities.