Cyberplasm’s debut LP, The Psychic Hologram, is surgery performed with a blunt force instrument. Spastic neon ectoplasmic bursts from a neural synapse shotgun barrel to barrel with your aural receptors nano targeted to eviscerate your flesh-reliant sensibilities bite by bite. Predicated on the Psychic Hologram theory of reality the album goes to great lengths visually and sonically to lay the groundwork for your internal revolution to become free of the synthesized reality our brains impose upon our flesh. The introductory track, “Power to Liberate” opens with the familiar/cliche fake robot female-type voice to set the sterile anti-feeling tone. “Dopamine Machinery” begins with enough guitar to signal this may be a pretty standard punk album, but leaning to toward those expectations is only to self-blind to the experience upon which you’re only gazing into from a threshold of safety. Hallmarks of this LP from top to bottom of course include incessant drum machining, and lots and lots of dense blinding distortion that bleeds upward into the vocals as well, distorted to the perfect degree in a rich crust tradition. “Nihilist Dictator”, nearer the middle of the runtime, is the best track on this one, reveling in overdriven amplifiers, thin and tinny distortion, and vocals landing (just barely) on the right side of indiscernible. Amid all of the sticky uncertainty miring the low and middle waves, we’re still wading through a forest of comfortable and familiar song structures cement-boot rooted in cold, abrasive, abusive textures. “Nervous Systems” is the band at its catchiest, and irrationally also its fastest and fiercest. “The Psychic Hologram”, an intermission track, almost dares me to use the word ‘danceable’, but I just can’t quite go there, so instead I’ll roll over it as a bass-driven neuvodisco groove tailor made for a 90’s alt-action film credits sequence.

“Perfect Body Pt 2” harks back to “The Psychic Hologram” intermission but this time around the same sounds and theme are affected differently; here it’s marching music, not dancing music. And then there’s just so much going on in finisher “Simulate Prison”. From a familiar chord progression to frantic glitchgallop drums, the listeners stifled flesh is looking for relief and release as we’re liberated with a welcoming fade out to white noise, which eventually fades out itself to nothing, just silence, the sound of your brain back to work, reprogramming itself back to peace, erasing The Psychic Hologram to resume its oppressive existence within the psychic hologram.

Primely impressive on Cyberplasm’s debut is the albums steadfast adherence to its mission, every lyric and synthesized drum beat pushes evertoward the goal of educating, liberating, radicalizing and activating listening recruits in the fight against our false reality, to confront the fabricated world around us and uncloak ourselves from The Psychic Hologram. To “free the body from the mind”.