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Friday, 26 July 2019

Humanextermination Project / Crepuscular Entity


Artist: Humanextermination Project/Crepuscular Entity
Catalogue no: BCE #26

Tracklist:

     1.      Humanextermination Project - naturemarchtoextinction
     2.      Humanextermination Project - mechanizedbloodpump
     3.      Humanextermination Project – crucible
     4.      Crepuscular Entity – Transgressed Evolution


This four-track EP (I suppose you’d call it) caught me completely off-guard, in a good way I hasten to add. I’ve encountered Crepuscular Entity before – in fact I recently reviewed their Harmfulmelodics album for this blog and I don’t think my brain has quite recovered from having all my synapses and neurons seared into oblivion. More on CE’s contribution later, as I must concentrate on Humanextermination Project’s utterly genre-defying take on what noise music can be.

It’s not the flesh-‘n’-bone vapourising blast of unmitigated chaos but instead something that’s very much difficult to translate into words. ‘naturemarchtoextinction’ finds the listener slap-bang in the middle of some twisted rainforest full of mutated creatures, singing out their hearts from the treetops in a mad high-speed warble. It’s strangely enchanting, unnervingly so, and in spite of that I wouldn’t like to catch myself anywhere near wherever this exotic locale may be. It feels like it was inspired in part perhaps by The Island of Dr. Moreau, with the addition of a generous helping of off-the-scale hallucinogenic fungi just to add something ‘interesting’ to the mix. In fact, the following ‘mechanizedbloodpump’ is probably the comedown after imbibing all those mushrooms: an extended hyper-dysrhythmic convulsion while the toxins riding the tube-trains of the blood vessels try to find an exit from the nightmare.

And so on to HeP’s third helping, ‘crucible’ – industrial machine crunch and disjointed rhythms showered by a rain of Vulcan’s fireflies, metal scraping on metal, axle-grinders like giant flywheels unleashing sharp-toothed fury and fire, the lava of molten metal spitting and sizzling like some cornered beast. It may not be ‘traditional’ harsh-noise/power electronics but it’s just as intense and supersonic in its own untrammelled and unconcerned way. It doesn’t care whether you like it or not, it just barrels its way through like one of those massive tunnel-drilling machines but speeded-up to 11.

I was also surprised by Crepuscular Entity’s immensely listenable ‘Transgressed Evolution’ – starting via a single irritating high-pitched whine which then goes on to evolve in all sorts of interesting ways, with layers of abstract and industrial machine-shop-like noises piling up on top of and crushing each other, churning and roiling in a Bessemer furnace of immense proportions, black smoke belching thickly into an already diseased sky, until it reaches the apotheosis of dissolution, annihilation, disintegration, and bodily discorporation. This is both nuclear fission and fusion all in one.

This, if nothing else, proves that noise as a subgenre of industrial/underground music still has much to say and so many ways to say it. I’ll have some more of this please.

Psymon Marshall 2019. 

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