According to Brian “Lustmord” Williams, Psychological Warfare Technology Systems was originally envisioned as the first part of a Terror Against Terror trilogy that would’ve culminated in a record of blistering white noise. Williams made the record with frequent collaborator Andrew Lagowski in 1989, but it didn’t actually come out until three years later — by which time, both of these guys had filed it away as a “missed opportunity.” The concept behind Psychological Warfare Technology Systems was 100% genius, though: chopped up and screwed film dialogue, samples of semi-automatic weapons/ explosions/ air raid sirens/ helicopters and hard techno beats. Williams and Lagowski purportedly put the record together as a giant piss-take on Front-242 — an attempt to make genuinely menacing, yet danceable, club-ready anthems.

Upon its release, both Williams and Lagowski groused that an extended stay in record label purgatory had already dilluted the record’s ideas and dated the production techniques. The pure ambient stuff (”Biohazard”) sounds like filler and electronic music has gone through about a million different iterations, but the mid-tempo stuff is totally forward-thinking and quite unlike anything else that was coming out at the time. How dilluted can the ideas be, anyway? This record came out at the tail end of the Cold War but seemed to forecast global terrorism and increased militarization. Here we are in 2008, the world’s in much worse shape, and Psychological Warfare Technology Systems (which has now been out of print for over a decade) is definitely due for a reissue.

MP3: Terror Against Terror, “The Only Good God is a Dead God”
MP3: Terror Against Terror, “Tactical Intervention”

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