01. uLtRa-PrObABle-fUtuRE-iNfoTaiNmeNt-SceNaRio
02. OuteR-SpaCe-EscaPisM-4eVEry1
03. reAcH-wARP-speEd-uSinG-Old-teChNoLOgY
04. PLanetArY-nAmInG-cONVeNtioN
05. UpSide-DownWards-tiMe-trAVel
06. AdVanCed-ScienTifiC-eXperiMent-iNteRrUpteD
07. cArEFul-obSeRvATioN-of-MiNiAtuRe-bLaCK-holeS
08. AStrOnoMicAllY-AcCuRatE-solAr-SysTem-mOdeLLing
09. neW-hAbITabLE-pLaNET-diScOvEreD-TheN-iGnoRed
10. sPaCe-StATioN-MaiNtEnANce

Psudoku is an impressive mess, the type of band you could wedge into a frame and sell for millions if you could just forge Wassily Kandinsky's signature. Its sound is stunning, both in the prosaic sense of "really good" and in the more literal sense of "conveying a painful jolt powerful enough to overstimulate the senses into immobility". Psudoktrination is a surprisingly effable release, but it's still wicked annoying.

The first three Psudoku albums have portraits hanging in prominent positions within the Weird Grindcore Hall of Fame. Thanks to its eye-watering high-contrast color schemes and ear-watering high-contrast riffing schemes, Psudoku represents the unequivocal apex of Steinar Kittilsen's experiments with sneezing an album into being; when I think of bands I enjoy that would make Kenny G vomit inside of his eyeballs, Psudoku usually comes up right away. The band's debut, Space Grind, was the most traditional of the lot: a big list of short songs with a hard edge that abrades like a stump grinder, recognizable as belonging to the terrestrial plane of fast-paced metal-noise-punk, but it was filled to the gills with such chaotic time changes and eccentric songs that it makes Discordance Axis look like Sleep. Planetarisk Sudoku followed up by committing grind sacrilege: only four songs, and each of them upwards of three minutes long (the last one being about 15, which is more impressive). It's a more technical work that grafts prog sounds onto the bones of stochastic grind and somehow comes out the better for it, a truly diverse exploration of sounds working with and around grindcore ethos in an unparalleled way. For me, the crown jewel is the yet-more-drastic change-up of album #3, Deep Space Psudokument: brighter, glitchier, and more electronic-oriented in its production and writing, returning to a more traditional grindcore structure while subjecting it to shrieking instrumental tones and a whole soundboard full of bleeps, bloops, and blorps. It's a headache and a half, well worth the few bucks on Bandcamp.

Psudoktrination is the band's first full-length in eight years. Or, if you subscribe to the timeline proposed by the Bandcamp page, it's the first in 14 years and the other two won't be released until 2037. That one might actually make more sense, because those middle two albums sound as advanced as they claim to be and Psudoktrination sounds like a reversion to an earlier form. This is Psudoku returning from deep space without the jazzy astral sediment masquerading as music, aiming for a more grounded grind sound akin to Space Grind. What an ironic thing to say, given the name and how unorthodox even that first album was, but this album marks a huge earthward shift compared to the last one. The compositional structures are still comparable to Deep Space Psudokument, leaning toward moderate song lengths with a mixture of rapid-fire stutter-riffs, illogically assembled rhythmic shifts, and the odd holiday groove (sometimes even with sax, as on "reAcH-wARP-speEd-uSinG-Old-teChNoLOgy" [I hated typing that out]). It is, however, a tonal opposite, mostly ditching the piercing treble of its predecessor's video game sound palette and neon-flashing effects; the variety of novel sounds, accentuations, and clear "melody" lines are now conjoined into one relatively consistent sound guitar sound and anti-melodic flux. Psudoktrination has a much stronger low end, too, with audible machine-gun bass rumbling right from the first song; it's the combination of this fuller, bulkier feeling and the less eclectic arsenal that push the album back toward a more conventional presentation.

Another contributing factor is that the vocals seem more present than usual, which recalls familiar hardcore lineage: whether more frequent or just more obvious, I don't know, and the album is still mostly instrumental, but I found myself noticing them more on this album than the others, and thus one of the chief aesthetic impressions I have is this harsh barking rather than klaxon squealing. Kittilsen, or Shuttle Mission Specialist Roger, as he's known here, utilizes a uniform delivery of echoing grunts, kind of like watery growls utilized as percussion rather than vocalization. I couldn't tell you whether there are any lyrics, and that doesn't sound like anyone's great concern (certainly not mine). Reverb smothers every "UGH", making them sound like equipment malfunctions echoing through the corridors of a space station. I quite like the strange space-caveman effect produced by this vocal style, but it's not hard to imagine listeners tiring of it quickly: it's an odd-sounding technique employed in stubborn repetition, so anyone not immediately sold will find it difficult to sit through "cArEFul-obSeRvATioN-of-MiNiAtuRe-bLaCK-holeS" or "neW-hAbITabLE-pLaNET-diScOvEreD-TheN-iGnoRed" (did I mention that I hate typing these out?).

The drums might be the major holdover from Deep Space Psudokument: they're programmed into such rapid sequences that they often blend into a machine whirr, and they hit, particularly the snare, with such featherweight impacts that they sound more like popcorn than a band trying to railroad you with violent noise. It's a technique that I think adds to the effect when your aim is to jam an entire pinball machine into your listeners' eardrums, but since this album is otherwise oriented away from that approach, I feel that it detracts somewhat from the speed, weight, and harshness that would otherwise be available.

While Specialist Roger, as before, is solely responsible for all of the instrumentation and programming on this release, Psudoku became a live act last year. I have no information as to when the writing and recording of this album began, but the qualities I've identified make me curious as to whether there was any push, conscious or unconscious, toward a standard live setup and that's why I get more standard grind vibes from this album. Regardless, Psudoktrination suffers from perhaps the one impediment most universal to grindcore: it feels repetitive. On the surface, that sounds like a ridiculous accusation; I'm pretty sure Roger wrote this by chucking a guitar down an elevator shaft made of rubber and recording whatever happened. Listen to any snippet and it's hard to say that there is any conventional design to it. It's exciting and unpredictable. But listen to several songs in a row and they begin to blend in an unflattering way. I find myself thinking that I've heard these riffs on previous albums or earlier on the same album, which makes it feel less random, and it starts to verge on cheesy mathcore rather than the totally extragalactic stuff I'm used to hearing from Psudoku. Now we're at a point where I could say that Chepang or Melt-Banana have been doing this better, when previously they were all doing different things.

Overall, however, I still find Psudoktrination an enjoyable bout with chaos. It's not nearly as bright as the last one, but it still has more treble than the entire rest of the genre produced in the last decade. It has a lot of bounce, insane and comical-sounding riffs slapping all over the place, and random explosion effects happening everywhere. It's ludicrous to talk about Psudoku in these minimizing terms of being more "normal", because grindcore is fundamentally an absurd thing to do. It's a ridiculous genre of music that inherently requires ludicrous speeds and spastic episodes of instrumental disjuncture even at its least experimental, so when you put it down on paper, it's hard to tell what's more or less unorthodox and what's good or bad; it's all a little bit cracked. Like the preceding albums, the complexity of its presentation is impressive, especially for a one-person project, and I happen to like cacophonous noise with no consistent tempo or time signature for more than 1.8 seconds, even if it's not searing neon across my retinas, so this will likely feature among my favorite grind-type releases from 2025. But, of course, every year there are more and more bands doing grindcore merely a little bit different, and it's not so often that you find a band that does grindcore like it accidentally invented the concept during consecutive high-speed rewatches of Project A-Ko and Italian Godzilla, so I hope that on the next album I can feel the same sense of pure adventure and madness that I felt on the three preceding this one.

Performance:	9
Songwriting:	7
Originality:	7
Production:	7