Maverick UK producer Kevin Richard Martin (Zonal / Techno Animal / King Midas Sound) joins Relapse for devastating new double album Machine, his first solo instrumental record as The Bug.

Machine started life as a series of self-released "floor weapons" (to use Martin’s description), landing in instalments between 2023 and 2024 on the Bandcamp page of Martin’s own PRESSURE label. And now - always his intention - Martin has collated a single, powerful, unified statement from those EPs. The album detonates apocalyptic dread-tech mutations of crushing intensity, fusing a unique new strain of futuristic dub with deadly deep electronics and killer bass riffs worthy of the heaviest metal. It is, writes Martin, “ice cold and dystopian.” It celebrates “atmospheric pressure, and the joy of full body assaults, via oversized sound systems in undersized club rooms.” Machine also represents the latest metamorphosis of the Macro Dub Infection philosophy Martin germinated with the groundbreaking series of compilations he began curating for Virgin Records as early as the mid 90’s.

As The Bug, Martin’s music is formed from an overwhelmingly explosive sub-bass pressure, as relentlessly in-the-red beat production amplifies mutant industrial sound design, fuzzed, expectant crackle, and bleak greyscale harmonics. Machine is no exception: no speaker exists big enough to withstand its weight. A fusion of William Gibson-inspired sci-fi and Jamaican sound system influenced brutality, the record personifies the "killing sound" after which Martin named his legendary 7" series that unexpectedly attracted the likes of Massive Attack and Grace Jones to his magnetic production style.

Here and elsewhere, Martin's material is often conceptualised as sound system punishment to be consumed by audiences of his PRESSURE label nights in Berlin. But home listening also reveals a remarkable dedication to highly textural and obsessional songcraft: Martin’s profound control of sonics makes up only part of a compound of eclectic inspirations. Dub riddims contort and mutate amidst the seething flames of blasted club music (in his youth, and to this day, he is a prodigious and encyclopaedic collector of exploratory Jamaican dancehall sounds; see 2021’s writhing, furious Fire on Ninja Tune); the grotesqueries of metal are slowed, stretched, ripped into shreds of hallucinatory cybernetics via the ghost of dub techno (In Blue, his collaboration with American-Chinese experimental vocalist Dis Fig). Ambient and drone music are made menacing and chromeplated (such as his rescore to landmark Soviet movie Solaris), while the sweat and ecstasy of the dancefloor are breathing alive somewhere in the ashes of a razed slo-mo wasteland (his work as G36 for example). Together, it renders the music of The Bug an unstoppable and irresistible force, devouring everything in its path, with an insatiable addiction for creating a futuristic and unheard sound that eschews genre controls. “A new form of dub,” writes Martin, “that owes as much to Rhythm & Sound or Public Image Limited / PiL, as it does to Scientist or King Tubby.”

Over the decades of storied and immensely varied projects and releases, Martin has become infamous as a subverter of expectation. In 2008 - after his tempestuous, grimy album London Zoo, where he and his longterm ally Flowdan delivered the instant classic Skeng - he characteristically surprised with the formation new trio King Midas Sound, whose alternating spoken word poetry and Japanese language vocals (care of British-Trinidadian dub poet Roger Robinson and WaqWaq Kingdom’s Kiki Hitomi, respectively) created a storytelling mode new to his canon. Then came more collaborations as his palette and output expanded. Longstanding experimental composer Fennesz, post-metal impressionists Earth, even the rarefied, mournful drone-folk of solo musician Grouper became foils for Martin to share his canvas. In 2019, following the trauma of his son’s problematic birth, he dropped all aliases and released Sirens, a heart wrenching study of dread and aching paternal love in the most isolated ambient zone.

With such a monolithic discography, it is no surprise that alternative-metal royalty such as Big Brave, Steve Von TIll (Neurosis), Aaron Turner (Sumac, Isis), Full of Hell, Nadja, and Primitive Man (also recent collaborators with Martin), have heaped praise on Martin’s music, hearing a kinship between metal riffcraft and The Bug's “floor weapons”. As The Bug, Martin has released music and toured with musicians such as Dylan Carlson (Earth), Al Cisneros (Sleep, Om), and his longterm soul brother Justin Broadrick (Godflesh, Napalm Death).

New double album Machine (released October 4th on Relapse) represents a cohesive and narrative journey through dystopian wildernesses. Throughout, the production shakes with scoured textures, black hole gravity, and deceptively crafted nuance, as Martin’s singular mastery of ferocious and annihilated bass music holds the record together in a visceral and pummelling assault. Indeed, Martin describes the EP sequence from which the album was culled as “separate parts of the overall puzzle that becomes fully realised on this longform album.”

Key moments “Buried” and “Bodied” live up to their names. The former is earthmoving in its sheer weight, opening with a riff-made-machine synthesis of corruscating tectonics over a heavystepping beat destined to destroy dancefloors. “Bodied” begins with an acid-corroded 4/4 kickdrum, around which noxious fumes sputter and billow, spitting pure poison that no human body could survive. It is industrial-strength doom-riff-dub, as slow and low as sonics can possibly go. As such singular music, few comparisons exist, but considering an instrumental SWANS in dub or Aphex Twin covered by Sunn O))) yields something close, though Machine turns up the crushing, pulverising intensity even further still.

Having recently reissued The Brotherhood of the Bomb and Re-Entry by Martin’s Techno Animal project with Mr. J K Flesh (Godflesh’s Justin Broadrick), Relapse represents a perfect home for Machine. Techno Animal reformed as Zonal in 2019, and released their acclaimed album Wrecked in collaboration with Moor Mother, also through Relapse.

The Bug has previously remixed Thom Yorke, Grace Jones, Public Enemy, The Beastie Boys, EARTH, and worked alongside countless luminaries of alternative and experimental music. His solo work as Kevin Richard Martin continues to blaze new paths of destructive and doom-laden drones. Notably he curated the now-seminal 1994 drone compilation Ambient 4: Isolationism. He has also created music as Ice, GOD, Black Chow and Curse of the Golden Vampire (with Alec Empire) among others.