GIGANTIC BRAIN

Grindcore / Metal Related • United States

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Gigantic Brain is a one-man Drum-Machine Powered electronic grindcore Project that is very different from the majority of electronic grind bands. Instead of a more Technology/Computers based sound, GB bring a Sci-Fi almost futuristic sound to the table, with lyrics, song titles, artwork all based around aliens/sci-fi.

The Brain has Released a split 10” with Umbrella on Crucificados Pelo Sistema and has had numerous splits and one Full-Length (Our Bovine Destroyers)planned yet never completed. Not until 2004 did they gain major attention in the grind scene when they released the Massive 63 Track “The Invasion Discography” on Razorback Records, cataloguing all their material up until that point.

Three more albums were released in 2009 (World, Betelgeuse EP, I Swallow 16 Red Planets), consisting of a more ambient sound, with minimal, but still powerful, grind elements.

Gigantic Brain has released all of his albums for free download on his MySpace page: http://www.myspace.com/giganticbrain

( Biography from read more...

Thanks to UMUR for the addition and tupan for the updates

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GIGANTIC BRAIN Discography

GIGANTIC BRAIN albums / top albums

4.00 | 2 ratings

World
Grindcore 2009

GIGANTIC BRAIN I Swallow 16 Red Planets album cover

4.00 | 1 ratings

I Swallow 16 Red Planets
Grindcore 2009

GIGANTIC BRAIN They Did This To Me album cover

3.50 | 2 ratings

They Did This To Me
Grindcore 2010

GIGANTIC BRAIN EPs & splits

0.00 | 0 ratings

Betelgeuse
Metal Related 2009

GIGANTIC BRAIN live albums

GIGANTIC BRAIN demos, promos, fans club and other releases (no bootlegs)

GIGANTIC BRAIN re-issues & compilations

GIGANTIC BRAIN The Invasion Discography album cover

2.16 | 4 ratings

The Invasion Discography
Grindcore 2004

GIGANTIC BRAIN singles (0)

GIGANTIC BRAIN movies (DVD, Blu-Ray or VHS)

GIGANTIC BRAIN Reviews

GIGANTIC BRAIN The Invasion Discography

Boxset / Compilation · 2004 · Grindcore

UMUR

"The Invasion Discography" is a compilation album by US, Virginia based experimental grindcore act Gigantic Brain. The album was released through Razorback Records in July 2004. Gigantic Brain was formed by John Brown in the early years of the millenium, and was at this point a one-man act. "The Invasion Discography" is a compilation featuring all material recorded by John Brown up until then.

The music on "The Invasion Discography" is one crazy mix of blasting grindcore, electronic effects/samples, programmed drums, assorted types of extreme vocals, and a futuristic sci-fi atmosphere. Most tracks are between a half minute to 1 minute long and with 63 tracks distributed over a 59:16 minutes long playing time there is a lot to dig into. The sound production is obviously created on a home computer, and while it´s fairly well sounding for that type of production, it´s clearly not a professionally produced product.

The music is quite adventurous with many shifts in style and genre within each track, but they are also rather chaotic and fragmented. So it´s definitely not a boring release, but it´s not exactly the most well written one either, if you appreciate memorability. This sounds a lot like it´s written and recorded to satisfy John Brown rather than to cater for an audience. It´s highly experimental and the more "regular" sounding grindcore parts are always followed by an atmospheric ambient part or something more experimental sounding.

Upon conclusion "The Invasion Discography" is probably very much an aquired taste. Some listeners will probably enjoy the crazy sci-fi concept, the home recording idea, and embrace the fragmented experimental grindcore style, while others will miss a bit more conscise and memorable songwriting, and a professional sound production. Personally I lean towards the latter opinion and a 2.5 star (50%) rating is warranted.

more than 2 years ago
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Report #451122

GIGANTIC BRAIN World

Album · 2009 · Grindcore

Conor Fynes

'World' - Gigantic Brain (6/10)

I would be lying if I did not say that this album surprised me. Gigantic Brain's first album was a sixty-two track hour of noise, nonsense, and bad taste. Taking the dissonance and digital choppiness of cybergrind and feeding spoonful after spoonful of noise to me was not something I ultimately found all that enjoyable, even if it was an interesting style that this one man project was playing. To summarize, I really did not like 'The Invasion Discography'. I was however, convinced to check out the second album, with the promise that it would realize the potential I heard in the debut. 'World' is indeed a huge step in a new direction for Gigantic Brain. Instead of focusing on the rusty grindcore elements, the project instead shifts its gaze towards more ambient territory. The result is still a fairly scattered album, but there is a lot more quality and depth here than what I heard before.

While there is still some of the cybergrind moments that 'The Invasion Discography' was full of here, most of Gigantic Brain's sound here revolves around ambient music, using alot of electronics to create soothing soundscapes. There is also a comfortable middle ground here that really impressed me; a melodic post-metal style that Gigantic Brain is very good at doing. Not sounding unlike Devin Townsend at parts, there is a futuristic sound that when paired with the atmospheric guitar work, paints a interesting image of space and nebulae. Gigantic Brain starts on what it without a doubt its strongest note; 'We've Reached The Stars'. A beautifully crafted post-metal track that uses Townsend-esque bombast and a wall of sound, my jaw dropped when I first starting listening to 'World', it was unlike anything I expected a Gigantic Brain album to sound like. Also, at four minutes long, this is comparable to, well, a regular song length, as opposed to the ten second jabs that I heard so much of earlier in this project's life.

Gigantic Brain does revert to its old ways later in the album, with songs that consist of inhumanly fast drum machines and blistering guitar chugging, all compressed into song lengths that rarely peek over the minute-long wall. These tracks don't tend to impress me in any way, especially considering they aren't much more than a reprise of what was on the debut. Thankfully though, these snippets are few and far between, most of the tracks are geared towards soothing ambiance. After a masterful first track though, I did find myself a little disappointed by the rest of the album, and some of these ambient pieces are prone to noodling around with synths.

'World' is definitely a huge, marked improvement over its predecessor, and there are flashes of brilliance here. That being said, it still gives me that meandering sensation with a lot of the filler that is here.

more than 2 years ago
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Report #257847

GIGANTIC BRAIN They Did This To Me

Album · 2010 · Grindcore

Conor Fynes

'They Did This To Me' - Gigantic Brain (7/10)

Although this enigmatic one-man project began almost exclusively as a cybergrindcore act, Gigantic Brain has since touched up its sound into something that is quite a bit more ambient, melodic, and atmospheric, rather than the obnoxious drum machine worship that plagued their debut. First showing a shift to ambient music with the second album 'World', Gigantic Brain has now developed into something that works much better with my personal tastes. 'They Did This To Me' is the fourth full-length outing by this act, and once again, I am finding myself impressed by what this guy can do with ambient textures, but turned off by the shallow grind elements. Luckily though, there is less grind in his sound than ever here.

If I was going to make a quick comparison to another artist with Gigantic Brain, it would be Devin Townsend. GB's ambient sounds are brilliantly layered with a deep wall of sound that sounds like it is from another world, and although this project still suffers from fairly scattered album structures and a lack of cohesion, the way he layers sounds atop one another is incredible. By 'ambient' as well, I don't necessarily mean quiet textures; there is stuff here that can get heavier, without diving into grindcore. The comfortable middle ground that Gigantic Brain minds is best described as post-metal, and while the drum machine is still cold and dispassionate sounding, the guitars and synthesized ambiance is very well done.

I get the feeling that there is some sort of atheistic narrative here about God not existing and there being no inherent meaning to life, although this is only brought about by the moments of spoken word dialogue; the growls here are utterly unintelligible, so they're best taken simply as another layer of sound, rather than someone speaking. For the sake of the album's ambiance, this is a good step forward, and helps bring about some level of heaviness, without losing the dreamy vibe of it all. There is lots of variety here amongst the ambient stuff, but- as always- my gripe with this album are the grindcore moments. I am not necessarily opposed to grindcore as a musical genre, but here, it does nothing but to throw off the mood of the rest of the album. There are only a few moments here that are devoted to the drum machine blastbeats, screaming, and downtuned guitar noise, so it's more a case of being a slight nuisance in between the interesting material that Gigantic Brain has to offer.

This is a very interesting ambient metal project, and while I still have some things to criticize about what Gigantic Brain is doing here, there are more than enough interesting ideas and beautiful moments to make the less glorious aspects worth it.

more than 2 years ago
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Report #257836

GIGANTIC BRAIN The Invasion Discography

Boxset / Compilation · 2004 · Grindcore

Conor Fynes

'The Invasion Discography' - Gigantic Brain (2/10)

The underground is filled with different abrasive styles of music, but grindcore is one such style that may be quickest to turn off prospective listeners. Essentially taking the most jarring elements of a few genres and melding them into one, grindcore is a noisy, messy sort of music, although there have been some artists which have taken the sound and done some pretty interesting things with it. Gigantic Brain is one such artist that opted to take the sound of grind outside of the screams and sour guitar feedback and take it somewhere more credible. Gigantic Brain is a one man project that helped develop cybergrind- being the fusion of grindcore and electronic music. 'The Invasiion Discography' is the first album by this man, and although it is undeniable that there is musical vision and potential that would later be realized with later works, this debut is a convoluted mess of an album.

The album essentially flows as one hour long track, despite being cut up into sixty three pint-sized pieces. The album structure reminds me somewhat of Thordendal's Special Defects' debut 'Sol Niger Within' in the sense that there is this sense that the whole album is one long track, but the thing has been cut into incomprehensibly small chunks. On that note alone, navigating 'The Invasion Discography' becomes a pretty annoying experience unless you have the full hour to invest in listening to it. Musically, the sense of messiness translates into just about everything that Gigantic Brain has to offer here. Much of the music is composed of dissonant chugging of guitars, electronically produced drum sounds that are made impossibly fast (and are often annoying as hell as a result), and some varied harsh vocals that are fairly abysmal in the way they are executed. The vocals switch from a high pitched shriek that could have found its way on an adolescent black metal demo, to some low gutturals that are nearly laughable in the way they lambast harsh vocals; suffice to say, the pig squeal thing is not working for Gigantic Brain.

What makes 'The Invasion Discography' all the more irritating is that there is actually plenty of promise and even some interesting things going on in tandem with the fairly gross grind elements. Quite often (but not nearly often enough), Gigantic Brain will pair the downtuned chugging with strange dissonant electronic sounds that make things sound even more unbearable at first, but it becomes really intriguing in an avant-garde sort of way after I got used to the sound. Sadly, Gigantic Brain's greatest flaw is that the music only ever hints at interesting ideas, giving the listener a sample or tease before taking it away and making room for some more ear-cringing pig squeals, or something else I would rather not hear. There is even a nice variety of dark ambient sounds here in between, but like anything even close to enjoyable in 'The Invasion Discography', it gets snatched away within seconds.

After listening to this debut, I am left both wanting to listen to more of what Gigantic Brain has to offer, while simultaneously reeling back in disgust from some of the less palatable aspects of the music that Gigantic Brain makes here. A fairly gross album in any case, with a few glimmers of hope here and there to make this all the more infuriating.