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Zen Paradox's work is both perky and mysterious,
playful and dark. Heavily rooted in glitch, the works
here are highly textured and much of the music, while
minimalist in nature, are endowed with energy and
drive, glitching right along at a pace that is
danceable, though this music is more EMM than EBM
(Electronic Mind Music versus Electronic Body Music
... I don't care if you liked my joke). Alive with
quirk and with the personality of a playful animal you
met in the electronic forest, these songs will
certainly appeal to fans of glitch-based techno. Zen
Paradox has displayed here the competence to handle a
style that's full of the possibility for artistic
glitches, if you will, but instead of creating what
sounds like a hopelessly schizophrenic computer, ZP
has instead crafted what could be the jittery speech
and language of an electronic life form.
[Ed. Additional info from solitary-sound.com: This album had a long gestation, its release coming almost nine years after the previous "proper" Zen Paradox album (Catharsis, 1996). The title of the previous album turned out to be quite appropriate, as the years that followed were indeed cathartic. Another Zen Paradox album (Legal Alien) was started, then shelved. Other distractions and side projects kept delaying work on the new album, but pieces were recorded during those years which did end up making it onto Numinosum. Mycalesis Perseus was recorded in 1997, Singing Statue 2 in 1999, and Aedeagus + The Opaque Stillness are from 2000. DeadZone was created by combining a Mutagenic Mind piece from 1995 (4 Days) with an excerpt from a live recording from 2004 (at Environ, Loop). Symbiotic Transfer was also based around a live excerpt from the same Environ gig (featuring James Wilkinson on trombone). The remaining pieces were recorded in the Solitary studio between December 2003 and October 2004.]-- review by Kristofer Upjohn
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