the welsh brothers are back! ever since their debut album "circumflex ", the family project somatic responses has impressed with their take on technoid industrial. on previous album somatic responses seemed like taking a step into other expressions. their 2008-album "digital darkness" was more harsh and dark with hardly any melody to disrupt the ongoing machine of complex rhythm textures, meanwhile the album "reformation" released in 2009 flirted with the sound of dubstep, though with the harsh edge of the healy-brothers. now less then a year later comes another work, from the project. in comparison to their previous aforementioned albums, it seems like the duo has gone back to the roots of their first albums: a sort of futuristic atmosphere with horrific yet emotional interventions. despite the associations towards their earlier releases, somatic responses makes it very clear on this album titled "neon" that the project has developed well over the years. excellent almost humorous interventions seems to occur, for instance with the funky like track "i was neon" while a track like "survive (mix)" is an upbeat and quite harsh beast. my personal favorite moment is the opening track titled "another rainy day" being an excellent old-school technoid funky piece with some excellent ambient-passages sneaking in. overall this an excellent shot from somatic responses. in fact this must be my all-time favorite from the healy's and referring to my opening sequence of this review this is definitely a challenge. highly recommended! (nm)

neon owns a very different light-frequency. neon is a gas, that kind of gas, which can be found in space mostly; on earth it’s a rare one… neon is the new album by john and paul healy a.k.a. somatic responses on hymen records! neon is one of those albums you will hear and love. no joke, neon is perfect. it owns a unique sound that will make you state whenever you hear a track from “…this is neon!” with neon somatic responses put all their musical skills and knowledge together, and created an album that is solid as a rock. a statement – a journey through different musical genres they are experienced in. from the early days of techno, acid, over to breakbeat, dnb, electro, dubstep and even breakcore. sounds a string together of musical styles, and i am honest i would be distrustful if the artists name wouldn’t be somatic responses. these crazy guys own the knowledge and the genius to put all these musical influences on one album and it still sounds made as one row. this is dance music – this is headphone music – this is total freedom and anarchy! somatic responses reached the top! neon is an album that forces you to climb on the highest point of your hometown and make you scream. fantastic&enthusiastic without loosing the ground. this is art, this is music, and this is revolution! what else do you want to know? perfect one!

On Neon Somatic Responses the dubstep is partly left behind and the techno influence returns. The techno beats are imbedded into warm ambient and idm sounds. Also the dubstep influence is better integrated which doesn’t make it sound as an enforced trend choice. Somatic Responses returns to its roots. ‘Another Rainy Day’ is strikingly excellent with its old school techno and ambient. The live mix of ‘Survive’ shows why Somatic Responses has followers in the industrial as well as the hardcore techno scene. ‘Dark Days’ is a very cool haunting dark techno track. You will hear breakbeats, techno, electro, drum ‘n bass, retro bleeps and industrial blended into dark atmospheric ambient and idm. Actually Somatic Responses lets all influences from its past return into a modern sounding electronic album. Somatic Responses will not attract many new followers with this but the fans of this project could care less since with Neon they get a strong album with adventurous electronic music which has many influences ingeniously processed. Recommended!

Somatics return with some elements that remind me of their upbringings in techno circles in the lightest sense of the word with blippy, happy electronics flitting around and carried along with drifting ambience and warm sponge like rhythms and quite fitting sound wise with the opener ‘Another Rainy Day’; bizarrely enough I can almost see the raindrops bashing off the windshield from the warm comfort of the inside of a moving vehicle.Everyone is trying their hand at tampering with Dubstep at the moment and whilst this is starting to become a tad boring, this duo have successfully added to it from their array of experience to stop this from meandering about too long with some playful cut and paste ping-pong balls of sound.A vast collection of sounds and electronic genre’s have been fused together when creating ‘Neon’ and for the most part this does keep the listener entertained through some variations on madness and the occasional trip into geek wankery which to be honest I actually appreciate; this won’t be for everybody however and its most likely that SR are creating an album for their legions of previous listeners rather than attempting to lure anyone new to the fold and there is an element of taking the ‘safe’ route, even if safe in this definition is pure sound sculpture and beat masturbation; Cool.

The album seems to me like a step back-/sidewards to a Giauzar-ish Structure. Most of the tracks providing a more ambient, quite IDM appearance as well as some Acid-Breakcore. The Dubstep period of the previous works seems to be over. Which is not bad actually. I like that sound, which is to me a more comprehensible step than what they did on the last two outputs.