Ambient Babestation Meltdown & JBS – Who Goes There EP (Optimo Music)

Ambient Babestation Meltdown & JBS repurpose material from SF paperbacks and VHS cassettes as ambient-not-ambient and EBM for Optimo Music

DJ, producer and voice of late night satellite TV adult entertainment Ambient Babestation Meltdown (aka Rachael Williams) follows in the steps of Cosey Fanni Tutti and brings her unique spoken word sound art transgressions to this cassette and digital collaboration with South London producer JBS for Optimo Music. The end result falls somewhere between TG and Model 500, repurposing the future as feel bad hits for outsider clubbing, industrial home listening and multiverse commutes.

“Litany” might be evidence gathered from a nearby universe of an early 1980s David Cronenberg Dune adaptation and pressing play is akin to stepping across the television threshold to find yourself on Videodrome (the show within the film). There’s something uncanny about the subtle VHS drone – ornithopters buffeted through an Arrakis sandstorm as if overheard from a TV in the abandoned house next door. Proceedings are imbued with an otherness that nonetheless feels like direct passage to Frank Herbert’s book has been established and you’re hearing the thoughts from someone’s mind as they read it. Rather than taking the standard sampling approach, Ambient Babestation Meltdown recites the “response from the Litany against Fear” from the novel as an invitation that crawls into your consciousness and gets uncomfortable there (you may well hear her voice for days). Whereas much latter-day ambient lacks bite, this submerges the listener as it subverts expectations, plugging into an existing SF work to make something new and strange.

Having set the tone in terms of approach for the rest of the EP, the Robocop-referencing “Dead or Alive” goes full throttle with a heavy EBM workout employing used-universe electro stabs. This is Old Detroit industrial electronics with Ambient Babestation a dominatrix delivering lines from the 1987 movie with deadpan precision (“Buddy, I think you’re slime”, “Dick, I’m very disappointed in you”) – imagine a gender-swapped Robocop overseeing Miguel Ferrer’s character’s coke-fuelled executive lifestyle as he spirals towards violent death. “Dead or Alive” is no less than Verhoeven’s satirical excesses expressed as underground electronics. Things get rather more disquieting with “The Other Place” and its pulsing wall of noise mapping a journey into interstellar darkness, not so much beyond the infinite as circling a version of Dante’s Inferno reconfigured as event horizon (Solaris meets Arthur Machen perhaps). Sonically, it could be an interpretation of Stalker’s diegetic sound world set to words from a cosmic horror story, the stars offering nothing but existential monstrosities.

Closer “Who Goes There” takes its title from the John W Campbell story that was the basis for The Thing from Another World and John Carpenter’s celebrated reimagining. Here the duo revel in ambient-not-ambient unease and machine soul malfunctioning, and Ambient Babestation Meltdown keeps her emotional distance even as she whispers in your ear, like a replicant haunted by nightmares of humanity (“I don’t know who to trust, I’m human”). Sliced beats cascade through radio drones evoking Antarctic isolation, while abstract synth pulses ratchet up the fear. “We don’t have much time, somebody in this room isn’t what they appear to be”, Ambient Babestation Meltdown informs us. “When we find him, we kill him”, she adds, matter of factly.

Who Goes There very much exists in its own universe, applying cut-up techniques to inner landscapes populated by worn VHS cassettes and battered science fiction paperbacks. There may be some pleasure in identifying the references, but appreciation of the EP by no means relies upon that (what lies behind The Other Place eludes me still) and you’ll start to see things that aren’t there while listening, connecting with your own SF experiences.

Who Goes There digital at Optimo Music Bandcamp

Cassette sold out at source but still available from select record shops – check Ambient Babestation Meltdown’s Twitter for details