Released on: 22nd June 2018
Conflating Psytrance with Goa trance Juno Reactor have been around long enough to know what they are doing when it comes to producing night-trance tracks that, definitely in the case of this album, will keep your pulse oscillating sharply through the darkest hours. Using their inescapable beats and freshly carved sounds to move through you like spirits caught in a storm. An electrical storm. Or perhaps just an electro storm.
Either way Juno Reactor and the accompanying live show The Mutant Theater will take the world by unforgiving storm. With the promo pics and video clips that are available on the interweb-a-renos looking like Nirvana in space. And if the nineties taught us anything it is that everything is much more awesome when it is contextualized in space. It seems like Juno Reactor know this too and give their melodies, beats and bass lines the room to expand and dance in mesmeric glee.
The Mutant Theater is undoubtedly stunning. As each track has the constitution of a mighty heavy metal and with the conductive properties of one too. There are endless opportunities to go from passive listener to active dancer infused by the power of all that is lovely and dark. The Mutant Theater is an exciting journey resplendent in artificial but massively undiscovered colours; Inspired, the scope of this album is visionary and beyond pop art.
Yet those claims to new and otherworldly ideas cannot be substantiated without understanding that the songs are firmly grounded in the evolution of Ben Watkins and Juno Reactor. And their passages; the voices on The Mutant Theater are instantly recognizable as the work of Juno Reactor who have, throughout their twenty-five plus year career, appeared in countless other mediums. The Mutant Theater is an extension of that sentiment and it is a solid example of the mysticism in electronic music.
10/10
