The Endif project began with Hollis collecting lots of bargain-basement equipment from yard sales and D.I.Y-ing music until he had something worthy of sharing. His second full-length, Carbon is all noise; no melody. Recording artists these days often prize the polished recording without mistake or analogue detritus, so it's nice to hear Endif crafting songs with steel wool. Many of the synthetic drums on Carbon are blown out to the point of sounding squishy. Yes! Destroy those drums. At times the music sounds like an orchestra of weapons from Metroid firing upon an ocean-liner-sized bulletproof slug.

At its heart, it's a good dance record, designed to capture your nervous system and turn you into a marionette in a strobe-lit frenzy. Carbon channels the typical, mind-numbing drum-n-bass rave and gloriously assaults it with lightning-fast bursts of decay, rusty 8-bit colonies of termites and the unrelenting weather on the planet Venus. If you've ever been to a rave and wished you could summon someone to please, please end this useless drivel with something hard, then I would recommend Endif as your avatar DJ. This is enjoyable, sharp-toothed music to dance to.

Opener "Churl" rips right out of the gates and is one of the stand-out tracks with its molar-crushing beats and android frog-throat bloops. Endif succeeds in changing the beats quite often as well as constantly altering the drums' timbre, quality and distortion like a dominatrix version of Squarepusher. This makes for a richer listen, keeping Carbon away from the lifeless bog in which most 4/4 dance stuff collects. Where Frontline Assembly drives off the industrial cliff in a James Cameron-piloted locomotive made of cheese with their boner for movie samples, Endif avoids the melodrama: burying his sparse use of samples in the fracas (except for several eye-rolling but tolerable moments on "Surgery of the Soul" where we have someone talking about "surgery on the brain.") This is good, as I cringe at mediocre sample-dropping. I prefer to let the music do the talking, allowing the listener's imagination to ride along and create the story.

Endif uses sequencers (such as Voice of Saturn) to create his crumbling textures, but rarely does the noise let up to give Carbon much sense of space. When you're dancing in the club you don't want that kind of space for fear of hearing your sweat hit the floor and breaking the illusion of a good time, but when it comes to an engaging album, I enjoy dynamics. You don't need melody to create dynamics, and "Power Noise" isn't done a disservice by throwing in a little silence or tension-drenched pause. If anything, it makes the harder points hit that much harder.

I enjoy music dubbed "IDM" for its experimentalist shrugging off of what will sell more records, and I also love albums that can channel an artist's attempt at innovative expression into something truly memorable and moving. While I detect Endif has truly crafted something sincere, I find Carbon lacking something in the Dynamics Department. Its beats are very satisfying, changing constantly, but a large majority of the record is just that: beats. Industrialized sounds definitely do the trick when you're making or seeking music that reflects your disinterest or disengagement with the establishment, but as a discerning lover of all music, I need a little more exploration from Endif. He's talented, certainly, so I think he will get even better. With his wonderful sound library, I can imagine him creating an excellent album that combines the compositional dynamism of some of his peers with his accomplished affinity for writing dance music that sounds like it is on the verge of destroying itself.