"Syndrome Syndrome", the debut album from GARDLAND, fuses human flaw and scattershot intuition with volatile machinery and chance-based composition. The double LP explores the rugged tropes of wasted "outsider" techno while exhibiting a stark emotive core, eliciting timbral intensity and questing pathos in equal measure. Imposing and muscular yet marked by frenetic finesse, "Syndrome Syndrome" is born from a dyslexic dialogue between man and machine. Assertive, though "elegantly wasted," as they describe it, GARDLAND is the laboriously cracked energy exchange of Alex Murray and Mark Smith. The duo solidified the young partnership during a psychedelic desert excursion far from their urban dwellings in Sydney, Australia. "Syndrome Syndrome" was written and recorded in a small room over a series of slavishly inspired sessions. Living within earshot of each other, Murray and Smith bucked the unconventional confab this comfort allows in favor of a workingman's deftness. In the middle of this process, GARDLAND's primary synthesizers were stolen at a gig. Impervious and industrious, the blank slate catalyzed their creative flow instead of stunting it, eventually filling to the frame with the eleven uneasy pieces of "Syndrome Syndrome". If linearity in techno / house is the convention, "Syndrome Syndrome" avoids flat-lining in its spiral and fractal formations. The beats here don't "drop", they appear erratically in uncertain quantum logic. The harmonic architecture forms cavernous canopies in place of metronomic melodies, while the convulsive human hand lays tonal tile that may or may not crumble on contact. Perhaps the most revelatory aspect to Murray and Smith's desert quest was their willing submission to co-exist with disorder - to have and to stranglehold for better or for worse. That transcendence only explains the psychosomatic palettes of "Syndrome Syndrome" though. The distinct other-ness of GARDLAND's reach succeeds by laying waste to compositional cliché, by mining the full contour and imperfections of electronic music shapes, and by allowing ghost narratives back into aperture to cause chaos and a spot of fun.