Prosthetics by Van Boom

With just two EPs having brought Van Boom's productions within earshot of a wide, forward-thinking audience in the last few years, his debut album, 'Prosthetics', continues the acceleration with an uncompromising statement of intent from the Kuwait-based artist. Orbiting hyper-industrial dread yet threatening to freefall into a melancholic blackhole, 'Prosthetics' introduces the scarcely balanced tension at the core of his work with a wicked and combusting fascination.

Firmly rooted in the Arab states along the Gulf Region, Van Boom is an outsider at home. Inhibited by the obligation to limit self-expression and artistic activity due to the top-down restrictions local to the region, his work questions what is forbidden and what is binary in an uncompromising context. Despairing grievances demand abrasive sonics, and Van Boom does not shy from delivering near-noxious doses. Co-production comes from Whiterose on 'XXX' and 'Agora', who also features on a suite of remixes that accompany the album. Deena Abdulwahed, VTSS, E-Saggila, Slikback, and more provide further pieces of 'Prosthetics' in reworked form.

As a mangled mirror to the social and state forces with which he lives, Van Boom's sharp and metamorphosing music cathartically seeks kinship through depersonalised ciphers born of necessity. The hammering distortion of 'Prosthetics' keeps up the turbulence, even when Van Boom relents. All the while, though, a self-reflective edge accompanies every extreme, which allies itself to the existential interrogation at the core of the work. With artistic expression ceaselessly observed from above in Kuwait, the raging compositions that comprise the album feel as terminally self-aware as they do frustrated by their circumstances. And as a rare voice from a burgeoning underground music scene, these transmissions are riddled with a complicated yearning that refracts the heady mix of cultural and theistic intensities at play.