Album: Surface Bone
Artist: Murderous Vision
Label: Live Bait Recording Foundation
Catalogue no: LBRF053
Tracklist:
1. Ancestral
Remnants
2. Surface
Bone
3. A
Thought that Shatters Teeth
4. Cries
of Mankind (2019 version)
This particular
incarnation of Murderous Vision is a collaborative exercise between Stephen
Petrus and Jeff Curtis (Iron Oxide, Vengeance Space Quartet) for a series of
three performances in February this year, in Cleveland, Oakland, and Los
Angeles. The version under review here is the digital release, which does NOT
include the full live recording of the performance at Coaxial Arts in LA which,
however, is available on the CDr
release. Note that all the tracks presented are the studio versions rather than
being taken from any of the live performances.
I reviewed MV’s Abscission recently and, whereas that
previous release stood firmly in the death/industrial ambient part of the
spectrum, this outing leans more heavily to the ambient end of the scale, with
Curtis’ contributions leavening Petrus’ background electronics, programming,
and vocals with effects-processed bass. The four pieces here are structurally
more complex as a result, but are no less affecting for all that.
What’s on the set-list
then? ‘Ancestral Remnants’ starts with a hovering drone, slow tribal
percussion, and an assortment of voices, an act of memory perhaps reaching back
into the now lost beginnings of mankind and civilisation. It’s airy, and floats
languidly, a silken scarf borne on a desert wind, a vision of ancient palaces
and tiled courtyards, oases and caravanserai, the bygone days of camel-trains
on trade routes and colourful bazaars. It swirls and gyrates like a
belly-dancer, and moves like a side-winder snake across hot sand. A boisterous
and scouring scirocco barrels through a desert in ‘Surface Bone’, throwing up
sand to obscure the vision, and through the rare breaks in the wall of airborne
silica we can perhaps see the fallen ruins of a once great city, whose streets
are full of the ghosts of the people who once made it their home. The
chitter-chatter of chimes and instruments, and distant barely intelligible
voices emerge piecemeal from out of the storm and the past to remind us of
those heady days of rare spices and hashish.
Next up comes the
heavyweight crunch of ‘A Thought that Shatters Teeth’, a blistering fuzzed out
juggernaut whose only purpose it seems is to trample and flatten everything
that has the misfortune to get in its way. This is truly down and dirty, about
as far removed from the previous two compositions as it’s possible to get, both
in terms of genre and mood. It’s suffocating, anguished, and lightless, a
scorching blast meant to flense and atomise. If you want a little doom in your
life, then this will be happy to oblige.
‘Cries of Mankind’ was
originally recorded in 2002 and appeared on the Times Without Gods album – not having heard that original I can
only vouch for the present iteration. A mournful lament of sparse drones
supported by an equally sparse scaffold of percussive beats breathes shallowly,
the brain-penetrating high tones lingering long like the last shimmering echoes
of a large gong long after it’s been struck. A voice intrudes, until it all
finally ends and fades away, leaving behind a profound silence in its wake.
The tableaux presented here
showcase the flexibility of not only Stephen Petrus’ approach to music but also
of expression and use of sound to create meaning and mood. For someone like me,
who ‘sees’ (but not in the synesthetic sense) music as well as hears it, it’s a
bountiful source of imagery, emotions, and ideas. This work is never static:
it’s highly suggestive, allowing the mind to wander along the roads it travels,
as well as prompting the imagination to fill in the spaces in between notes.
The ‘aura’ (for want of a better word) of these pieces surrounds the mind and
body (especially ‘Cries of Mankind’), infusing its flavour into every cell. It
may not be a particularly long album, but it contains a lot more craft,
emotion, energy, and ideas than many a much longer affair. Paying close
attention is worth its own reward on this one.
Available as a digital
download and as a pro-printed CDr, limited to just 100 copies, from here:
Psymon Marshall 2019.
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