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|Polish Import| Hidden Agenda was released in Europe in '95 on Hyperium.
Cold waves of electronics are juxtaposed against voices that seep through cracks in the walls of machinery and wires. Lyrics dart out in bullets from sound-scapes peppered in sharp vocals and sound bites... Such is the imagery that spawns attrition…from its earlier sparse and stark sound-scapes, to a more expansive palette of orchestral work, Attrition has successfully melded several genres into one. The music flows, from goth to industrial to experimental to classical, so smoothly, they might as well be making their own category.
"...Check out the post-industrial phenomena that Martin Bowes lines up on this splendid album: consumerism (the modish, airbrushed box sleeve),new technologies (a planetful of synths and samplers) and postmodern decentring (a bewildering array of borrowed styles glimsed with disorientating speed and transitoriness). This is a seriously listenable, cutting-edge industrial masterpiece, an album that for once dares to transcend the genres narratives sure, there's the time-honoured blurring of the known boundaries of sound,but there's something more than the usual gothic grind here - something traditional, something almost representational. The found-sound panorama Bowes creates can sometimes be almost picaresque in it's diversity - scratched mongrel-barks, looped coughs, flyaway piano, all underpinned with rock tempi and heart stopping stop-starts. "From a whisper, to a rage" the sleeve contends portentously, but with sonic polyvariance like this on show it's an apt description. "Wetenscap (dream number nine)" is a case in point - scraps of seraphic singing and timelapsed rolling tides whirlpool around a sluggish two-cylinder beat, when in wanders a plaintive synth intoning Beethoven's big "Ode to Joy" theme from the Ninth Symphony. The approach occasionally brings it's own problems - there's a sense that, occasionally Bowes is after atmosphere for it's own sake, and discards an idea too quickly in order to show off the next one. But when one considers the refreshing change of colours Bowes brings to this often over-monochromatic genre, those are trifling matters. great stuff." The Wire UK