Year: 2004/2025
Label: Die Schöne Blumen Musik Werk/Zoharum

Polish Zoharum delve once again into the Genetic Transmission archives to uncover yet another long out of print, obscure release from Tomasz Twardawa’s vast archives. This time, the Zoharum treatment gets 2004’s My Inspiration Is You.

The promo sheet describes this as an intense, massive album created from fury, pain and hatred. Apparently, this was Twardawa’s own description. However, the actual musical contents of the album are, at least in my opinion, something quite different.

On the whole, My Inspiration Is You can rather easily be classed as industrial noise. It is entirely atonal and abstract. But if one expects cacophony and abrasiveness from noise – well, look elsewhere!

Instead, My Inspiration Is You and its lengthy compositions take their time to build up the abstract compositions – or would it be more correct to call them sound sculptures? It is as if Genetic Transmission sculpt the shapes and forms with whatever his musical equivalents for chisels, hammers and rasps were. Probably analogue synthesizers, effects, makeshift and/or customized instruments, and found sounds.

The music consists of slowly evolving and building layers of droning metallic noises, strange whirring and rotating sounds, what sounds like the processed sound of metal plates, etc. The result is not so much one of fury, pain or hatred – more some kind of alienation, estrangement and dissociation. The weirded-out, alien feeling comes in particular from processed, heavily edited sounds living sounds – the barking of gods, human murmurs, etc.

Comparing the album to the previous Genetic Transmission release we reviewed, the 2023 re-release of Offals Of Emotions (here), we much prefer this one. Though by no means an easy album to wrap one’s head around, it is much more approachable, atmospheric and a more rewarding listen than Offals Of Emotions.

Within the spectrum of noisy industrial, My Inspiration Is You is definitely on the least harsh, abrasive and cacophonous end. Instead, in some ways, it’s much more akin to ambient in the sense it’s quite unintrusive a lot of the time. Even at its noisiest, such as on the last of the six nameless tracks, the album never gets too noisy or confrontational. The reverberating, distant sound, as if coming from the other end of a long metal pipe, makes sure of that.

If Offals Of Emotion eluded us entirely, this one we sort of like. It’s a bit left field of our usual tastes in noisy industrial, and perhaps some of the tracks drag on a bit with their 10+ minute running times. But nonetheless, there’s a certain weird, skewed charm to this album.

Visit Genetic Transmission’s official website