Audiopile Review: First time reissue of this absolute all-timer from Jack Dangers’ Meat Beat Manifesto project! Following up from 1992’s Satyricon, an album that foreshadowed the big beat explosion in the latter half of the 90s, Subliminal Sandwich took that manic energy and merged it with the burgeoning sounds of illbient and trip-hop, teaming his industrial-strength breakbeats with a hallucinatory wall of samples culled from the dustier corners of jazz, lounge, funk, experimental, reggae, and psychedelia. Cabaret Voltaire, Lee Perry, Lonnie Liston Smith, Stockhausen, Dick Hyman, Edwin Starr, and John Cage are just some of the wildly varied artists whose sampled work appears amongst the rapid-fire and collage-like design. Distributed in North America via Trent Reznor’s then-fledgling Nothing imprint, Subliminal Sandwich, by proxy, was slotted into the world of industrial rock but had way more in common with the concurrent soundscapes brewed up by Techno Animal or Scorn, which is particularly evident in the latter third of the album. In that final stretch (only part of the second CD of the original 2xCD set is represented here), Dangers gets downright exploratory, pushing past his pop-forward tendencies with lengthier tracks that rip through sci-fi wormholes of shaky bass, scorched guitar and samples warped beyond recognition. At this point, Subliminal Sandwich was the first MBM album to be an entirely solo endeavour for Dangers after the departure of Jonny Stephens, though Stephens does make an appearance here on guitar for an anthemic cover of the scratchy post-punk nugget “Asbestos Lead Asbestos”. And while he would continue to expand on the big beat sound even further with ’98’s triumphant Actual Sound + Voices, eventually moving into the darker corners of IDM, jazz, dub and experimental (check this year’s collab with Merzbow for proof), Subliminal Sandwich remains a highwater mark in the now extensive MBM catalog.

Subliminal Sandwich is a 1996 double album released by Meat Beat Manifesto. The album is more experimental than the group’s prior material, composed of lengthier pieces that incorporate more ambient textures and drones and fewer samples or defined song structures.

Subliminal Sandwich was composed during Meat Beat Manifesto’s 1993 tour supporting their 1992 album Satyricon. Two singles were released from the album, a version of World Domination Enterprises’ “Asbestos Lead Asbestos” and “Transmission”.

In 2015, Fact Magazine ranked the album at number 47 in its list of “The 50 Best Trip-Hop Albums of All Time,” saying “it remains an interesting offering, drawing links between trip-hop, dub, industrial and ambient with a touch of psychedelia.”