- In a career spanning almost 30 years, the Frankfurt-raised, Hamburg-based artist Marc Acardipane has written a staggering number of records. This stockpile of music, covering just about every electronic music style you can name, has been made using more than 80 aliases and disseminated across a matrix of interconnected, self-governed labels, including Planet Core Productions (PCP), Dance Ecstasy 2001, Cold Rush Records and, later, Acardipane Records, Planet Phuture and Resident E.
Of all his aliases, Mescalinum United might be Acardipane's most famous, with "We Have Arrived" widely considered the genesis of hardcore. Under various names, he released several huge chart hits, including a track as Marshall Masters that was later covered by Scooter. The Mover is arguably his most underrated alias. Simon Reynolds referred to The Mover as "the forgotten man of techno." It's certainly the alias Acardipane admitted to spending the least time promoting—until now.
Last year, The Mover officially came out of retirement. His two PCP albums from 1993, Frontal Sickness and The Final Sickness, were remastered alongside a compilation, Selected Classics (Remastered 2017), which Angus Finlayson commended for its strangeness rather than its dance floor potential. You can dance to The Mover, but it's more of an enslaved stomp. It grinds you down and builds you back up with emotionally charged melodies, buried within the rave maelstrom. Undetected Act From The Gloom Chamber is the first new album from The Mover since Frontal Frustration, which came out on Tresor in 2002.
The LP contains all the classic Mover hallmarks: the rollicking kick drums, the oppressive atmospheres, the mentasm rave stabs, and a generally catastrophic outlook—all conveyed best in the record's opening melodrama, "Dark Comedown," and the exceptionally deranged "Doom Computer." But contrary to its titles, the LP isn't all doom and gloom, thanks to the more sprightly electro flourishes in tracks like "Shadow Deception." Acardipane isn't new to electro—Cyborg Unknown's Year 2001 was released in 1990. The sound is moulded here in The Mover's despondent aesthetic, as heard in "Shadow Deception"'s acid rain-slicked breakdown.
Undetected Act From The Gloom Chamber excels when Acardipane's pick-me-up drum programming and crippling, visceral melodies combine with an inescapable funk groove, as they do on "Fire Cloud" and "Lost." Tracks like these hook you from the inside, and from there The Mover's mesmerism works like a slow-release painkiller. By the end you're left in a kind of fuzzy state, rave-numb to the annihilation of the world around you.
Tracklist01. Dark Comedown
02. Stars Collapse
03. Stealth
04. Shadow Deception
05. Calculations
06. Lost
07. Doom Computer
08. Fire Cloud