In Japanese Buddhism, it's believed that when someone dies they are ushered down one of six paths depending on the karma accumulated during their previous lives. A being might end up in the world of humans, animals, demigods, or celestials, but it's also possible to end up reborn as a pitiable hungry ghost, doomed to an existence of insatiable desire, or even worse - be sent to hell, or jigoku. Ruled over by the Japanese lord of death Emma-ō, this hell isn't quite like the Christian hell, it's closer to purgatory, and cleansing the karma can take hundreds of millions of years of excruciating torture in extreme cold or immense fire. Japanese bass alchemist Gorgonn takes these themes as the basis of his debut album "Six Paths", assembling a spiritually weighty set of futurist dubs that consider the possibility that our mortal domain might be closer to hell than we realize.


Gorgonn describes himself as a Japalien exile. He left the country of his birth almost two decades ago, and since then has been working tirelessly to formulate Jamaican dub, noise, techno, and no-wave into a sound he calls "sci-fi steppas". If you've not come across his name before, there's a good chance you've heard his reverberations. An established sound tech who's worked with The Bug, Hype Williams, Seefeel and others, he's part of G36 with Kevin Martin, Dokkebi Q with Kiki Hitomi, and a former member of Devilman with DJ Scotch Egg and Bo Ningen's Taigen Kawabe. Just last year he released the acclaimed "Disentegration Dubs" full-length alongside JK Flesh, the veteran producer who's best known for masterminding Godflesh. All this experience blesses Gorgonn's productions with remarkable sonic force, and "Six Paths" is his most crushing display yet, smelting cannonball bass and osmium beats into sharp-edged soundsystem weapons.


Look no further than opener 'Abyss' for evidence of this: psychedelic synths draw the mind away from the mortal realm, while tangled, distorted beats push us back down to earth, our faces crushed into the grit and gravel. Using tweaked sub bass and unsettling drones, Gorgonn lays out a cinematic backdrop for the album, drawing us into a world that's terrifying, viscous, and nauseatingly familiar. There's a militaristic roll to 'Without Beginning and End', a track that juxtaposes spacey halfstep thrusts with death metal distortion, footwork polyrhythms, and unearthly pads that addresses the crushing endlessness of jigoku. On 'Invisible' meanwhile, Gorgonn torches the skeletal remains of D&B, abstracting familiar rhythmic patterns into fuzzy, ritualistic cycles that sound both ancient and humming with prospective technology. But on the closing track 'Life as a Beast', it sounds as if Gorgonn has come to a conclusion, and in a flurry of acid squelches and doomy foghorn bass blasts, he seems to have accepted that being reincarnated as an animal might be the best anyone can hope for. Who knows, you might end up as a cat.