Album Review: geocidal by t?t?ma

Mike Patton is a guy who seems to be up for collaborating with nearly everybody as long as they can be counted on to bring something strong and off-center to the table, and that seems to be what led him to cross paths with Australian composer and performer Anthony Pateras. Working together under the group name t?t?ma, Patton and Pateras have created an intelligent but ferocious mixture of avant-garde experimentalism, world music accents, and heavy metal velocity on their first album together, geocidal. Patton has described the theme of the album as "the murder of place," and if you were looking for a soundtrack to global chaos, depicting a world where nothing seems truly stable or certain, then geocidal fills the bill from the start, as the ominous percussion and didgeridoos on "Invocation of the Swarm" give way to the neo-metal thunder of "Pure War," constructed from found sounds, crashing drums, and Patton's larynx-pummeling vocals.

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It's difficult to know where to start with a record like this. Mere words cannot quite adequately prepare a curious listener for a foray into the world inhabited by tētēma. It sounds nothing like one could reasonably expect a collaboration between a celebrated Australian pianist (Anthony Pateras) and Mike Patton (frontman of Faith No More et al) to sound like.

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Faith No More Mike singer Mike Patton’s latest side project is a collaboration with Australian composer Anthony Pateras, who scored psychological thriller Errors Of The Human Body in 2012. Recorded in sessions at a French convent and a San Francisco studio and featuring analogue electronics alongside strings, brass and woodwind, ‘Geocidal’ is monolithic. ‘Pure War’ is like UK drum’n’bass kingpin Roni Size getting spiked with GHB and fed through a woodchipper, while ‘Tenz’ surges and crashes like a malfunctioning machine, Patton’s chants, screams and whispers dragging it to its conclusion.

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