Download - Furnace Re:Dux

Dwayne Goettel co-wrote every track on Furnace and never heard it come out. He was found dead on August 23, 1995, and the album, Download's debut and the first project he and cEvin Key built outside Skinny Puppy, was released later that year on Cleopatra dedicated to him. It remains the most haunted record either of them made.

The music goes further out than almost anything in the Puppy catalog. Working with Phil Western and Mark Spybey, Key and Goettel pushed past song structure into long, corroded ambient-industrial stretches: frenetic beats collapsing into dead air, machine noise treated like texture, tracks like "Cannaya," "Attalal," and the nine-minute "Marred" unfolding as if scored for a film nobody made. Genesis P-Orridge appears on "Omniman," "Lebanull," and "Marred," and the vocals arrive sounding both malevolent and mechanical, the one recognizably human element and the most disturbing thing on the album. The whole thing plays like a transmission from somewhere burned out and still smoking, dissonant and unexpectedly beautiful in the same breath.

Furnace has been chased by collectors for decades, partly for the music and partly for the original packaging, whose cover was among the first ever to use lenticular printing. Key eventually bought the rights back from Cleopatra and issued Furnace Re:Dux through his own Subconscious Communications in 2007, limited to 1000 copies and long since gone.

This Metropolis reissue restores the full thirteen-track album and pairs it with the Re:Dux bonus disc: eight extended jam sessions that became the raw material for everything on Furnace, running well over forty minutes on their own. A rare chance to hear the record and the work that made it, from the last sessions Goettel ever played.