Mike Meegan’s RXM Reality takes to musical creation with a chaotically brilliant method from the very start of blood blood blood blood. MAIN MENU hears him throw everything he possibly can at the DAW to see what sticks. Robotic screams emit from the ever-changing shroud of sound. A voice repeats the word ‘yeah’ as if some poor rapper has been instructed to try and find a rhythm to drop into and simply can’t find the hook. Beautiful choral voices can be heard through a heavily distorted gauze of sound. Before we’re ripped from that moment and cast into another one. The low frequency sporadicism hits like some devilishly powerful machine gun. All of a sudden, lighter noises begin to spread across the soundscape rather than all of the sounds simply hitting in one cacophonous instance. The air clears and a hook does ameliorate. Harboured by a fiery salvo.

B4 brings a more melodic mess to the forefront. Great sheets of notes gliding across the engorged middle space. Out of the numb pile of noise comes huge vocal samples swooping above slowly padding percussion. A voice echoes into the landscape. Considering the make-up of the track, somehow the melody is made timid and unassuming. A more gentle tune in the midst of terror and turmoil.

As we move further into the album. The dissonant noise relents somewhat. Hooks start to wander from the wreckage, though it feels like you have to squint your ears. My Friend, Molly hits with a dark synth loop hidden behind restrictive bass and snare. It’s starts to twist into a distorted lament, driven to heavy scratching by the unrelenting percussion.

Table 1’s deep bassy samples shoot past clattering hi hats. A rhythm stumbles into place. Voices mesh with incidental noise as a synth injects feeling and glitched emotion into the track. At points, when the instrumental opens up, it feels as though the listener is staring into a furnace. A heat seems to come off of the sounds like they are constantly creating friction between themselves. Another shy tune begins to weasel its way out of the noise. Loose snare drums rattle into an echoed soundscape. The texture dives once more near the end, and RXM Reality pulls up corroded sounds from the bottom of the ocean trench.

Closed Eye Neon VG Maps gives melody prevalence momentarily as a sharp synth line starts supported by bass hits. It shatters as a heavier force begins to drive behind it. It comes back to the front, more acidic and aggressive than the beginning. The warring elements of RXM Reality’s songs drag us from pillar to post in lightning quick speed. But in this track, percussion and melody seem to work in tandem, more closely than before.

Tunnel of Bones provides a link between the two halves of the album. And it’s almost as if we are taking some insurgent pathway past the hellish noise outside. The songs starts with controlled synthwork and ends with more chaotic noise as we enter the world outside once again.

My Own Skeleton Visualiser almost sounds like a contemporary grime instrumental that’s been left to become overgrown with time. The bass structure is there, but all the parts sound unkempt and lack the tidy brevity of a grime track. Halfway through a heartfelt voice pushes itself through a digitised wall, creating membranous vocal sounds. RXM Reality deconstructs sounds before our eyes in real time. The chattering nature of the songs is the inevitable result when you break sounds and genres down to a molecular level and try to rebuild them.

EXHALE sounds like it’s going to be a song of respite but very quickly we begins to find ourselves hitting against heavy metallic sheets as knives fly overhead. At some point we find our way through the violent maze and are greeted by an ethereal voice calling like a siren through a constantly transforming plane. The vocal line is so effective that it almost soothes the jilted nerves from the spraying percussion and heavy distortion.

FINGERS IN YOUR MOUTH sends grenades of sound flying over head as we are buffeted higher into the air. A chipmunk voice stretches over a searing beat pattern. More breathtaking vocal parts find a way through the fractured and fragmented environment.

DJ Big Shoutout is Missing is a definitive highlight. RXM Reality takes a vocal sample and sends it careering through a galaxy of different frequencies. The brilliance of the production causes the vocal part alone to be an unyielding spectacle. This moment breaks down after around a minute. A brooding piano scratches against a distorted stereo floor, crawling on its belly. Again, that feeling of conflict arises as each percussion hit feels like a grenade going off. The last third brings a deconstructed grime-like midi sound to the forefront alongside a menagerie of voices and wheeling sound.

QUEEN TIKI presents one of the most danceable tracks on the album. An ad-lib keeps the whole train from derailing as high pitched voices eddy around in the background. Even the bass seems to loop around, with sounds repeating on beat. Still the track is fringed with a sense of chaos and non-linearity, trying desperately to make its way in. Each percussive element suddenly transforms into a ballooning mess towards the end as were forced to jump from one comedically inflated drum hit to the next.

A broken voice leaks out of the hull of Psychics Hate Him before another dark, grime-influenced synth line begins. Rapid in its delivery and intimidating in its melody, percussive outbursts fire from either side. The texture turns from airy to water-tight within seconds. At this stage we’ve learnt that each song is a schizophrenic onslaught. The listener surrenders to bedlam, unaware of whether they have entered a new track or simply a sporadic venture into a new sound. There is something in the artist’s flow that ties it all together. The homages you hear to certain electronic genres keep everything loosely strung together.

R.Y.P meshes aqueous synths with an unpredictable rhythm consisting of shards of speech and sound. Great waves of arbitrary fuzz sweep over the listener as we hear a drum begin to find its beat. The sounds are multifarious and too numerous to compute. But it feels as though we stand on side with Mike, it almost feels like the glitched mess is something that he is struggling through to. Every evident melody and rhythm we attribute to him, and every offbeat and fragment of arbitrary noise we fob off as some troublesome spirit who has savaged the music.

Deaths, Resurrections and Ascension finds its beginning in a brooding, airy sequence. Percussion slices from each side as a binary melody that seems to consist of blowing wind tries to stay on its path. Again, chaotic sounds and textures haunt the peripheries, waiting for their opportunity to pierce what’s left of the sensible song narrative. And they do, suddenly the track erupts into a broken piano riff hindered by huge distorted fuzz and a stabbing vocal sample.

END MEMO presents a heartbreaking memory heard through the juddered moaning of some behemoth robot. RXM Reality’s production is spiky and unforgiving, but the beauty of the melodic sequence seeps through every gap it can. This is wiped out momentarily as the robotic percussion overwhelms the mix. Lasers bounce off of sheet metal as we try and clamber through the last few seconds of blood blood blood blood. The melody fades back in behind this destructive climax.

In RXM Reality, Mike Meegan finds a way to accentuate emotive melodies and sequences by decimating, destroying and concealing them behind expertly crafted noise and commotion. These melodies and movements should be buried under the noise, but the two coexist so perfectly throughout. The balance that is struck is one that isn’t often found. However in blood blood blood blood we hear an artist who is able to find a middle ground between an enticing sense of chaos and a heartfelt ear for beautiful music.