"In The Beginning There Was Rhythm",said The Slits in another time and in another place. But in the first deformed son of the couple Lanz-Riaza,there wasn't rhythm. Inside the spirals of "El Acero del Partido",the seeds of a british counterculture(that we all know very well) were irrevocably altered in their growth by the toxins of an abattoir for the "slaughter of metals" called Esplendor Geométrico. By my opinion only some mad spanishmen could give birth to a simil monster,one of true heavyweight champions in the world league of the hardest&greatest records of truly genuine industrial. Two versions existed of this one: the first with a "tumor" cover,and a segunda edicion with a "train"one(the year of press it's the same for both,1982,and IMHO the best of two is the second,the only one that embodies the sense of the A side). In fact the the title track is a treasure inside the masterpiece,a real "train of thoughts"(sorry dream theater!) full of the best noises you can heard on a piece of wax. The incipit is a chain of exploding loops that remember really a monstrous steam machine that begins his action, soon followed by anothers similar to amok electrical discharges on the wet floor of a power plant. The loops are divided in regular pairs(the "explosions" and the "electricals") concatenated like aminoacids on a dna sequence, and are repeated at regulars intervals. But much more simply one is the reverse of the other. The piece subsequently puts pressure on boilers, and increases the speed. Now this diabolical locomotive is in full swing,and after a parentheses of distorted vocal samples and high frequencies hisses, here comes the pain,and the real heart's piece. Now the train has mutated into a hydraulic press that crushes automaton after automaton, twenty minutes dominated by a metallic loop(similar to a tank march) opposed by a proto-rhythmic pad like a lame horse in the grip of frenzy (and finally, there was rhythm). Dulcis in fundo the end is a pixel bombing along four minutes, Glitch twenty years ago? Maybe.The flip side,"Hèroe del Trabajo",is in my opinion obviously inferior to the title track,but not less stellar. Now the rhythm is fixed, and the first beats are walls of feedbacks superimposed on a 3/4 iron-tribal pad,seems the score of "Escape From Absolom" played by R2D2 and C3PO on LSD. Very simple,but very effective. But the best is yet to come,and in the next seven minutes the legendary sound of EG was born. The industrial-techno (or rhythmic noise if you prefer) that later someone called ebm(with the obvious differences), at its height it's all here. But i will not say more, it's your turn to dig out this gold nugget, to discover the hallucinates frequencies that inhabit these furrows.Only one other thing: more i listen to this disc and more i'll cheer Spain during the next World Cup. Sorry countrymen.

Essential stuff from these Spanish industrial cult heroes. It's not easy to give an actual description of the music they make, so let's just stick to a few keywords that spring to one's mind when listening to this: raw distorted electronics, radicalism, minimalism, huge factory halls, pounding machines, power tools. Their brilliant Esplendor Geometrico* - Eg1 debut tape is highly recommended as well !