No romantic trip into the sunset here – Gaja and Huren come to Arma with a nihilistic determination and a one-way route into absolute darkness. Gaja, aka Alessandro Gaia, was last seen pounding out Bracny Chelloveck on falling apart. Once locked into the throes of Berlin’s ceaseless techno throb and now back home in Albenga, Italy, Gaia represents the gnarly, noisy extremity of modern dance music. It’s a desolate, distorted place where blasts of noise spit in the empty footprints once shaped by snares and hi-hats, and the bass bleeds out over everything. Listen closely though – the deeper you take yourself into this forbidding space, the more you can detect the subtleties. The delicate relief of the harmonic overtones, the brutally managed modulation. It’s bleak, to be sure, but it’s also beautiful. Huren is the current guise for David Foster, a Canadian techno vet of high standing thanks to his role in the seminal Teste project. A true underground lifer, he’s cavorted through a cavalcade of aliases and projects over the years – as Huren he’s most noticeably wielded rhythmic noise explorations via Clan Destine, FALK and, since the late 90s, on Zhark. You can sense the primal, instinctive act of creation in his three offering on Ride Or Die – this is the sound of someone for whom post-industrial rhythm mantras and exorcistic utterations are second only to respiring and perspiring. In two distinct but complementary ways, Gaja and Huren showcase the vivid expressions achievable within monochromatic, noise-oriented techno. It’s a sensory experience matched with unsettling accuracy by Judex Franju’s intense sleeve design.