Hexadiode is an electro-industrial duo from Dayton, Ohio, whose career started in 2014. They have already recorded three albums: Ibex (2016), the remix album Contaminated (2017) and Metaxy (2019) that we are going to review. If after reading this text, you get curious, you can listen to the record or buy it, on vinyl or CD here. Tim Krug, one of the members of the band together with Jonas Miseh, has published, just a couple of months ago, a new album under his (halicon) moniker, you should listen to it too.
The industrial atmosphere of their hometown can be found in these ten tracks that together with two remixes form Metaxy. We start cautiously the working day in the factory with “Distraction”, and slowly but harshly the industrial rhythm gets our attention, until, in the middle of the track, Hexadiode starts to give us a sample of their power. The first voices remind us of Eber from Laibach, although in the rest of the album the voice sings with a rage hardly heard in the Slovenian musician. The factory and the duo start working full power with “Impulse Matrix”, a powerful song loaded with the energy of EBM. And because in manufactures, the most important thing is production, here we can only praise the one of “Markov Chain”, with an updated version of the industrial sound and a sense of epic similar to the one of NIN. “Invariant” is a short interlude, a disturbing gear in the dynamic of the album.
It’s evident that “Brain in 3” has not been produced in an industrial way, because the noisy production really stands out and it’s full of details. We get in the darkest and deepest part of the factory with another interlude, really interesting and industrial: “6th Dialect”. “Parasitic Static” is a potent EBM track with some disturbing keyboards. If this song were part of the Modern Times soundtrack, Chaplin’s classic would become a terror movie. We enter heavily in “Extreme unction”, but it’s the last minute that makes us look backward with astonishment. The track that names the album “Metaxy” (a classic concept that can be translated as middle ground) gives the right amount of energy that we, workers of the factory need. And at the end of the assembly line, we find one of the most experimental tracks of the album and, without any doubt, our favourite one: “13 of 12”.
Regarding the two remixes, the one of Guilt Trip adds extra of darkness and a guttural voice, meanwhile Blush Response transforms the factory in a dance floor, without losing the industrial vibe. Let’s see with what Hexadiode treats us in the future.
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