Hip-Hop/Review MODUL8 - Corpse Sonata Vol. I
MODUL8 is a Dutch artist and AI innovator with a two-decade history of exploring sonic extremes. His musical journey began in high school with a passion for high-energy genres like speedcore, metal, drum & bass, and breakcore, alongside a fascination with language that led him to poetry and battle rap. After feeling uninspired by contemporary music and leveraging his work at the forefront of artificial intelligence, he began to develop unique workflows in his own "music labs."
The listener is dragged headfirst into MODUL8's self-created genre of "curbstep" with “Corpse Sonata Vol. I,” a frantic, high-voltage collision of phonk, dubstep, trap, glitch, and boom bap. The debut album's 14 unrelenting tracks make it feel less like a playlist and more like a forensic analysis of sound itself, a crime scene where each beat has been examined, changed, and reincarnated as something wild and fresh.
MODUL8 creates a realm of psychological terror and creative insanity right from the first track. While the production veers between distorted rhythmic bursts and cinematic basslines, the words are rife with imagery of obsession, compulsion, and decay. A flurry of multi-syllabic rhyming schemes and machine-gun double-time flows, his delivery is both systematic and uncontrolled, implying an artist who is totally engrossed in his work.
In keeping with the album's themes, the end effect is an experience that hovers between genius and madness. The use of sound design by MODUL8 is remarkably haptic; guttural bass drops, reversed samples, and metallic clanks combine to create an eerie and fascinating environment.
The assertion that the old genres are dead and that their carcasses have been reanimated into something primal, frightening, and visionary lies beneath the turmoil of “Corpse Sonata Vol. I.” It's more than just a debut; it's a brutally honest and surgically accurate autopsy of contemporary music.