Takyon (Death Yon)

"Takyon (Death Yon)" from "Exmilitary" is among Death Grips' earliest and most viscerally disorienting tracks, the production operating in a mode of pure noise-collage that somehow never loses its physical impact. The bass is distorted past the point of pitch identification into something that functions more as pressure than sound, while the upper registers carry fragments of sample and synthesis that arrive with the quality of peripheral vision rather than direct sight. MC Ride's vocal performance here is at its most stream-of-consciousness, referencing tachyons — faster-than-light theoretical particles — as a kind of shorthand for content moving at speeds cognition can't quite track. The experience of listening is one of deliberate overload, the track providing more simultaneous information than processing can accommodate, which produces a state that is not confusion exactly but something closer to radical presence — the mind releasing its organizational habits because they're insufficient. Culturally the track exists in a lineage of noise music and industrial hip-hop but arrived as something genuinely new to mainstream awareness, a signal that the group had developed their own vocabulary thorough enough to be internally coherent even when externally opaque.