reviews

The Jeopardy Maze - Rock Sound magazine - UK - 1999

"A violin caustically weaves it's way amongst a collection of analogue synths and organic beats on Attrition's best offering to date, an album as musically stylish as it's artwork suggests. The Jeopardy Maze is an almost perfect example of darkwave-ambient, a subtle and sinister tapestry of electro and classical elements with the occasional female gothic vocal progression strung across the top. Spine-tinglingly atmospheric but not an album to put on at parties, unless you want everyone to leave. This is a very personal listening experience, an isolation in sound and not something to be intruded on. Occasionally it displays too much of the bands industrial roots and some intrusive chanting noises, but otherwise this is essential listening. The perfect gothic antidote to the bloated fuzz of more recent triphop, The Jeopardy Maze is dark, sinister, and impeccably good."
Alex Whitehead

The Jeopardy Maze - London Vampyre Groups Chronicles. 1999

Already familiar with the dark artwork of american artist John Santerineross (his website holds such treats for you) I was immediately transfixed by the cover artwork for Attrition's number twelve and most recent album. An arresting visual that demands intense scrutiny is nothing less than i would expect to represent the electrical wizardry composer Martin Bowes, widely known for his industrial/gothic surreal ingenuity in creating nightmareish soundscapes that you want to delve into.Coming on like an orgy round Lucifer's dinner table, human limbs flung aside like gnawed upon scraps with the in-house bone tub thumping disco in the adjoinging room.
Waste not want indeed! With such a plethora of devilish charm concocting bad ass visions from the wine's vapours, the trip is hypnotically mesmerising. oh how the fallen angel learnt to party with the collective penance.
Are we always cursed to remember life's frail and succulent breast beaten tragedies that brought us to this plateau? or will death allow the skin shredding shrug of noxious memories?
Better ask attrition to put in a good word for you.
Sister Doom

INK magazine/USA. 1999

From the dance floor to the killing floor, from haunting gothic dreamscapes to virtual nightmares. the Jeopardy Maze proves that industrial aint dead yet. Working with Franck Dematteis, the violist from the Paris opera who collaborated with Attrition on the 1997 album Etude, and the gorgeous voice of Julia Waller, Martin Bowes adds his own electronics, samples, and obscure poetic lyrics to craft this fine demonstration of what happens when industrial dance meets classical meets dark ambient.

I never would have dreamed that viola could work with industrial (unless you were smashing it or something), but it does here, and damned well, adding a sometimes ethereal, sometimes demonic quality to the songs. "Dream time collector" is a good exemple, with fractured bits of electronics, distorted female vocals, and viola all pounding past your head at the breakneck speed of dream, like the old twilight zone images warping by, while Martin darkly intones rhymes that are all the more disturbing because they almost, but don't quite, make sense.

There's plenty of danceable material here too, like the beat-heavy "Waste not, want...more", and a strong dash of British humour, as in the "wah" synth version of "God save the Queen", dedicated to Wendy Carlos (of switched on Bach fame) that closes the album.