The London experimentalists have fashioned something genuinely otherworldly here, their handmade fretless guitars serving as both instruments of destruction and creation. By stripping away the frets—those precise markers that most metal and hardcore bands fetishise—Tritonic invite dissonance, variance, and ambiguity into genres that typically worship at the altar of technical exactitude. It's an act of deliberate sabotage that paradoxically opens doorways to the infinite.
The sonic landscape they've created mirrors their conceptual ambitions perfectly. Acid Bath's crushing doom provides the gravitational pull, while Baroness-style wailing guitar melodies soar overhead like emergency flares shot into the void. The tension between these elements—the earthbound sludge and the transcendent melodic flights—creates a musical equivalent of their visual metaphor: rickety spacecraft navigating medieval maps of reality.
What elevates "Alexamenos!" beyond mere genre-splicing is Tritonic's commitment to their heretical vision. Their embrace of pop and indie sensibilities within hardcore's brutal framework shouldn't work, yet it does, creating moments of genuine beauty amid the wreckage. The fretless guitars wail and bend in ways that feel both ancient and futuristic, as if channeling some primordial frequency that predates musical convention.
The accompanying video, crafted entirely through DIY practical effects, deserves equal praise. Kit-bashed spacecraft, coloured ink swirling through water, and lashings of gold paint create a visual language that perfectly complements the music's temporal confusion. Watching pilots navigate T and O maps while seeing "all of time simultaneously" becomes a meditation on humanity's eternal struggle to chart the unchartable.
This tension between ancient and modern, reality and anti-reality, analogue and digital, seeps into every aspect of the work. It's distinctly British in its intellectual ambition and willingness to treat disparate cultural artifacts—second-century Roman graffiti, medieval cartography, space-age futurism—as equally valid source material for contemporary art.
The production captures this conceptual sprawl admirably, allowing the fretless guitars' microtonal wanderings to coexist with crushing low-end and surprisingly hooky vocal melodies. There's a lived-in quality to the sound that suggests these songs were forged rather than merely recorded.
In an era of algorithmic precision and digital perfection, Tritonic offer something increasingly rare: music that celebrates the beauty of imprecision, the sacred power of getting lost. "Alexamenos!" stands as both monument and mockery, ancient graffiti and space-age prophecy, a reminder that the most profound journeys often begin with removing the very things that keep us on course.
Essential listening for anyone ready to abandon their maps and trust their instruments.