Year: 2026
Label: Steinklang Industries

This is a hard release to review. Francesco Hernandez, sole member of Mexican Escuadron De La Muerte, passed away untimely in late 2022, before finishing the album he was working on. The tracks he had time to finish constitute this posthumous release, complemented with tracks from a split with Alpha+Galates.

That’s the tough question, and one I feel is important to acknowledge when listening to this tape. Whilst the tracks themselves may be finished, an industrial album is usually much more than a bunch of tracks lumped together. There’s an arch, a progression, an over-arching concept or drama. And, inevitably, this is left lacking on Prototype 1900-2020. Francesco might have scrapped some tracks, ordered them differently and made more to complete the album.

That being said, Prototype 1900-2020 is a fine release of experimental electronics and industrial noise. Most of the material on the tape leans towards the more abrasive and noisy end of the spectrum, but Escuadron De La Muerte rarely go in for a full barrage of chaotic, cacophonous noise. The tracks on the tape excercise constraint, unleashing chaos only at select moments.

This doesn’t mean that Prototype 1900-2020 wouldn’t be harsh. It is. Its soundscapes consist of distorted, crackling layers of vicious noise, rumbling layers of broken, cracked bass frequencies and high-pitched shrieking layers. The production is covered in overblown, amplifier-busting fuzz, making many of the tracks an industrial sludge.

The compositions themselves frequently consist of looped layers of sound, which makes Prototype 1900-2020 an unnervingly jarring, grating and tormenting listening experience. It feels like a never-ending headache or a fever-nightmare. Over and under the layers of noise Escuadron De La Muerte layer on samples that, in a noncommittal sort of way ground some of the tracks conceptually. Some of the samples even come across as a bit humorous, in a very demented, skewed kind of way.

A random reader would be forgiven for assuming that characterizations like industrial sludge, broken bass and never-ending headache mean I disapprove of this tape. But friends of harsh industrial music will know better. Whilst Prototype 1900-2020 might not be the apex of industrial noise, it is a more than adequate slab of harsh abstraction, one that balances harshness with a choice few moments of more atmospheric expression and variation. It’s not all the same kind of blaring white noise.

Prototype 1900-2020 might not be the album Francesco envisioned. We’ll never know. But, undeniably, as a final, posthumous testament to the man, this is a release worthy of the name Escuadron De La Muerte.

Visit Escuadron De La Muerte on Bandcamp