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Fractured – Remembering one of the most original electro industrial acts from Canada

22/2/2019

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Fractured was an electro industrial act from Canada, that started in 2003 as a solo project of legendary musician Nick Gorman. His first release was a demo titled Contami-Nation, whose marvelous qualities caught the attention of an European label, Dependent Records. Soon afterwards, Fractured became more of a real band, with the addition of two musicians, Famine and Morgana. The trio together worked, conceived and released in 2005 the debut album, Only Human Remains, a formidable and fantastically original masterpiece, that came to be Fractured’s most successful and iconic release. 

With eleven tracks – What Is The Moment Of True, Only Human Remains, Everytime, Becoming One, Bleed, Between The Lines, Haunted Memories, Stratified Society, One More Time, Try To Forget and Cold Eyes – this record undoubtedly is a milestone in the history of industrial music. With sinister and hazardous, though imperiously melodic and exponentially intense harmonious layouts, Only Human Remains became an exceedingly majestic underground reference for the genre, with its derelict and lugubrious, though sensible and dense style, that definitely contributed to establish more serious, professional and artistic principles to industrial music as a whole. 

The most notorious songs from this album are the title track, Only Human Remains, Becoming One, Bleed and One More Time. Despite all of its undeniable qualities, versatility and authenticity, Only Human Remains is an underestimated album, that never achieved the true degree of recognition and acknowledgement it deserves. Although deeply appreciated by the underground – moreover, a small, though devoted group of cult followers – the album displays sensible, melancholic and intuitive peculiarities, that reveals a powerfully creative and audacious musical narrative, with crucial and deeply innovative elements, that configures on the diagram of its sonorous anatomy a gracious level of inventiveness, that demonstrates an elegant and marvelous degree of brilliant cohesiveness, originality and dedication, relatively uncommon in the genre.     

Several years after Only Human Remains, in 2011, Fractured released its second (and so far, last) album, Beneath The Ashes. With the departure of Famine and Morgana, this record is basically a solo effort of Nick Gorman, and not a collaborative group creation.

With twelve tracks – Beneath The Ashes, For What, You Are (The Voice Inside My Head), Anaesthetic, Transcendental Rage For The Fundamentals, Dig, Save Me, Straight Jacket Fashion, Interlude, Fly Away, We Bare These Scars and
Disengage – this album has more serene and melodic tunes, and reverberates protuberant, sophisticated and elemental idiosyncrasies, that represents an elegant and creative evolution, that condones an artistic departure from the more crude and rough sonorous surface of the previous album, that, despite its unexpected level of gracious and virtuous originality, was more closely associated to traditional industrial music.

With mordacious and sensational audacious overtones, the almost radical change in style reveals a restless artist with an unquestionable disposition to reinvent himself without fear of trying new things. Despite its elegant harmonies and sensitively genuine sonorous outlook, this album is not as fantastic as the previous one, nor did it draw so much attention. Nevertheless, Nick Gorman displays his diligent musical abilities, and exposes the creative density and outright versatility of his graceful talent. My favorite tracks in this album are: You Are (The Voice Inside My Head), Dig, Straight Jacket Fashion, Interlude and Far Away. 
 
For me, these four tracks are the most representative of Fractured’s music, and their most elegant, lugubrious, dispersive, pungent and incisive songs.

This is certainly my favorite Fractured music, and probably the first one that I’ve heard, several years ago. A formidable, lucid and spectacular exemplar of industrial music, its hostile and rough tonalities reverberates on its renitent sonorous diagram a sensible and perceptive conjuncture of harmonies, that gracefully contrast its impenitent and hazardous ordeal with the poetic and beautiful majesty of the song’s melodies.    
Here, you have the same song, though in a different version (described as the “original” one). It’s exceedingly beautiful and elegant too – with more fatalist, imperative and auspiciously dense melodic overtones – that certainly increases the ascendant corporeal cohesiveness of the rhythmic body of the music, expanding vividly in more diluted and overall flexible passages. In my opinion, somewhat inferior to the previous version, nevertheless, this is an outstanding and exhilarating song, that deserves its place of honor. 
This is my second favorite Fractured song. One More Time is a beautiful and melancholic industrial serenade, whose melodies transpire a lugubrious and fading humanity, conceived by the gracious depressive musical layout of a primordial and comprehensive artistic sensibility. 
Becoming One – in order of preference –, is my third favorite Fractured song. With a very lucid and sagacious melodic direction, the song reverberates a subtle and discreet agony, that is overtly dispersive and cynic, though fulfilled by a spiritual aneurysm that overcomes in the depths of its furiously dense harmonies the darkness of reality. 
Conclusion: 

Since Beneath The Ashes – released eight years ago – Fractured hasn’t released anything. So, it’s hard to define the project’s exact whereabouts, if it’s in a dormant state or if it’s ceased to exist for good. 

It’s difficult to say if Nick Gorman will ever release another album under the Fractured moniker. Apparently, the project never officially disbanded, so it’s impossible to say precisely what’s Fractured current status, especially giving the prolonged hiatuses between albums. Nevertheless, we certainly wish nothing but success to Nick Gorman in all his musical (or non-musical) projects. If he ever reform or release anything in the future under the Fractured name, we will be dying to check to it out, in great expectation. If not, the album Only Human Remains will always be an iconic release of industrial music, a genuine milestone, cohesive and beautiful enough to consolidate his legacy and contributions to the genre. 


​Wagner
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