For their latest release, French reissue imprint Camisole turns its attention to Japan, compiling a retrospective of sorts of the Vanity Records-adjacent MLD, comprising two tracks from their 1983 7" and nine previously unreleased cuts. Though never appearing on the label, Vanity is the ideal place to start with MLD - ie abrasive, metallic, primitive electronics that push at the edges of technical expertise to find their own distinct voice. Within that orbit, it's perhaps Sympathy Nervous to whom MLD are most closely aligned, both forging, in their own haphazard, unexpected ways, some sort of proto techno language. MLD is an acronym for Minimal Lethal Dose, and it's no accident that that kind of darkened, quasi-industrial mindset bears close resemblance to Throbbing Gristle - there's certainly a shared collapsing of expectation of form and function approach running through these eleven tracks. This is not really what you might understand as minimal wave or synth pop, but something a little more destructive (or deconstructive), whether by accident or design. It's that kind of iconoclasm that makes these previously unheard experiments so appealing all these decades later.
