Optimal’s Rolling Stock (ROPE WORM RW3) is a fairly heavy barrage from the Polish creator Paweł Starzec, whom some readers may know from the label Positive Regression and as a member of Centralia, Dignidad, Mazut, and Mazutti. We certainly heard the Mazut duo back in 2016 with their CDR simply titled #1 and enjoyed its grim claustrophobic vibe.
Today’s material was apparently recorded in 2023 and 2024, but might be attempting to hark back to 1990s drum’n’bass genres, including Jungle, illbient, and ambient breakcore. You might say the music splices up all that rich Polish gloom and pessimism with stainless-steel industrial music, and then propels it all on wheels driven by intense beats. Even I, who remain ignorant of most of these genres, can discern the ingenious layers and dynamics at play in all of these shortish (3-4 mins) tracks, and admire the way Optimal pushes so much information – none of it particularly pleasant – into such cramped spaces. His themes, if any, allude to many unwelcome developments in urban life of the 20th and 21st centuries, including industrial pollution, paranoia, surveillance, excessive mechanisation, drugs, and the laying waste of the landscape. No wonder the plea of the beleaguered modern human being is ‘Please Let Me Sleep’, as stated by a pathetic wretch on track 5 here.
An exhausting listen, but if you can survive the hammering beats of the opening cuts you’ll find the record settles down into less insufferable areas and the 13 tracks, taken together, amount to a convincing but depressing portrait of modern life. The sampled voice recits which pop up occasionally are perhaps an old trope, but they do instil a sense of alarm. (09/07/2024)