At a time when Detroit, Chicago and Belgium were at the center of the electronic music map, a duo from Brooklyn, NYC, consisting of Joey Beltram and Mundo Muzique, kick started the real revolution in techno music, surprisingly, the second one Beltram was involved in before the age of twenty one. With Energy Flash, he turned the world of techno music upside down. As hard as it may to believe, Mentasm was even larger and more influential. It launched the listener into a thickly layered miasma, a state of hyper intense oblivion, where self glorification and self destruction collide. The overwhelming mentasm sound - (as it would be popularly called from then onwards), - like a swarm of killer bees – was created on Roland's Juno Alpha synthesizer. The track felt as though an immense aural cyclone was hitting you in divergent waves, making your fragile body shake and tremble in uncontrollable ecstatic simultaneous outbursts of joy and disbelief.
The tune hit the world of electronic music to an unprecedented extent, at least not felt since the original acid house phenomenon, from the east coast of the USA, to the furthest corners of the european continent, influencing virtually every artist with a piece of equipment at their disposal, regardless of the musical genre they were into. The sound typical to this track layed down the foundations for hardcore in years to come, and was the definite hard techno track back then. Joey Beltram once said how he wanted to recreate the vibe he felt listening to heavy metal bands like Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin as a kid. "I like evil, dark music" he remembers.
He was also quoted saying how Energy Flash and Mentasm were his attempts of making techno music faster, since he always like to pitch his records up as a DJ. Initially, Mentasm was best received in Belgium (just like Energy Flash), and in an old interview he did for iD magazine, he said that the people there were the first ones he successfully established a healthy relationship with, and how they are very forward thinking.
Do check their release out, as Mentasm is one of the five best and most important achievements within the realms of electronic music – ever.