(Translated from my original Italian text by ChatGPT and Piero Scaruffi)
Vancouver's industrial school of the 1980s reached a temporary peak with Numb, a project by Don Gordon that stood on the border with techno music.
Not only have Numb never released a bad record, but they defined terror in techno music like no one else (except perhaps Front Line Assembly at their most inspired moments) had managed to do. Their music is the sonic equivalent of a well-dressed man turning the corner, pulling out a butchers cleaver, and silently slitting the throat of the first passerby.
Formed in Vancouver in 1986 by multi-instrumentalist Don Gordon and singer Sean Stubbs, Numb debuted the following year with the cassette Blue Light. They became known in the scene thanks to a self-titled 1988 album (for Onslot) of violent and blasphemous techno such as God Is Dead and Eat Me.
The following Christmeister (Onslot, 1989) was dominated by the brutal personality of new singer Blair Dobson, who turned tracks like Eugene into sonic torture chambers, resonating with groans over mechanical rhythms. Screamings of pain such as Dead Inside were driven by violent electrical shocks in the tradition of Nine Inch Nails and by even more tribal rhythms. Their composite sound was being defined between traces of hardcore (Frantic) and industrial cadences (Bliss), hip-hop syncopations (Cash) and staccato sampling (Christmesiter).
With Dobson replaced by the more restrained Conan Hunter, Numb released their third album Death On The Installment Plan (Reconstruction, 1993), an audio-collage of pneumatic hammers and electric saws: the rhythmic torrents of Curse, the magma of distortion of Hole, the nuclear explosions of Trial, and the guitar deliriums of Headcrash paint a moral landscape of dark terror, existential anguish, and animal instincts.
After Wasted Sky (Kk, 1994), a much more dance-oriented album, David Collings replaced Hunter and Stubbs returned as percussionist.
Under the pseudonym Downtime, Numb contributed tracks to the compilations Deathrave 2010 (COP) and Coordinate One (Dossier), two milestones in the evolution of dance music. Here too the emphasis is entirely on raw fear.
Numb also composed the soundtrack for the film Photographic Memories, consisting of a cello suite inspired by Schuberts Piano Trio (somewhat of an icon in vampire films).
(Original English text by Piero Scaruffi)
Koro (Metropolis, 1996) contains the single Blind.
Blood Meridian (Metropolis, 1997), ostensibly a concept album on serial
killers, combines the techno charge of Gordon's later works
(No Time) and a noir perversion that comes from a different well
of angst (Deserted).
Language Of Silence (Metropolis, 1999) is more of the same, just less
inspired (Suspended is the "hit").
Halo Gen (Metropolis, 2000) is Don Gordon's side project, a visionary
soundtrack for a futuristic hell. Gordon as a melancholy minstrel in a
sub-human wasteland is more gripping that his usual industrial self.
