Album: Gnarled Ritual of Self-Annihilation
Artist: Black Earth
Label: Cyclic Law
Catalogue no: 134th Cycle
Tracklist:
1. Doctrines
of Dissociation
2. Abject
Practises Beyond the Threshold
3. Behold
the Serpent
4. The
Sharp Blade that Mutilates the Void
5. Drowned
under Seas of Coagulation
6. Lurking
Hounds Stagger in the Deep
7. The
Mourning Waters where Fire never Dwells
Imagine waking up one
morning to find that the world has gone dark, and that the sky is an
overarching canopy of black clouds that restlessly roil and churn. Somehow,
between the evening of the previous day and the next morning, something
hitherto thought impossible has happened: the machines we built to serve us
have attained sentience, and are now on a death-march to trample and destroy
their former masters. What had been a bright daydream of colour and lustre, has
become a blackened, rotting nightmare of mechanical insanity, an oil- and
blood-stained hallucination, a steel-bladed vision of horror and mass
extinction.
This is the scenario that
Spanish dark ambient/death industrial/death ambient/noise project Black Earth outline
for us on this, their second full-length, after 2015’s cassette release A Cryptic Howl of Morbid Truth on
Graceless Recordings (and subsequently released on vinyl on Silent Ruin
Laboratories and Bestiarie in 2018). This isn’t simply a barrage of
undifferentiated noise and static: if you listen carefully there’s a narrative
thread running through it, a horrible, nasty, genocidal, and apocalytic
end-time prophecy, written on the ripped skin of bloodied corpses and the
skeletal frameworks of buildings that once stood proud and tall. Both nature
and artifice lie in ruins, smoke rising up and hanging like mourners in a
cortege, overlooking a funeral for mankind.
In spite of seven tracks
being listed, this is in essence a diptych, one single composition in two
parts, in line with this release not only appearing on the CD format but also
on 12” vinyl. Side one details the machines’ initial assault, the massed armies
of steel, iron, and silicon steamrollering their way through the fortifications
and habitations of the human race with nary an effective defence arrayed
against them. The weighty sweep of innumerable instruments of destruction and
desecration roars, drowning everything out and flattening all before them, and
from the moment it starts in the first few seconds of ‘Doctrines of
Dissociation’ until the fading away of track four, ‘The Sharp Blade that
Mutilates the Void’, it’s a raging torrent of jet-powered floods of pure
machine noise, a cascade of howling, whirring, and unrelenting pandemonium, an
unstoppable barrage of acidic effluvia and sludge, and a downpour of caustic, diseased
rain. Structures which have stood for centuries, millennia in some cases, quail
and capitulate under the tide of mechanised onslaught.
But it doesn’t end there
– not by a long shot, because then follows the second sweep, the chasing down
of any remnants of resistance. Side two is the aftermath, the desolation, the
deracination, the elimination of anything that might possibly represent
opposition, and the sweeping up of suspected rebellion. Earth has become a
ruined, blasted, forsaken place, adorned with nothing more than burnt-out
shells of what were once cities, some buildings still reaching up to Heaven with
stretched fingers as if vainly beseeching divine intervention. The entirety of
the land has been scorched of green, leaving behind thick carpets of soot and
ash. The world and those it carried with it on its journey around the sun are
now nothing more than memories, lost to time, and lost to the universe.
While the second tranche
of pieces maybe quieter in volume, this in no way means that the horror has
abated or lessened in any way. The planet is still smouldering, fires are still
burning, and the land will forever be scarred, twisted into unrecognisability
by animated hunks of metal with machine intelligence and lacking any form of
compassion. Blood has been spilled, perhaps to fertilise the ground so that new
life sprouts eventually, but the cycle may be repeated many times before
stopping when the machines themselves begin breaking down and grinding to a
halt.
Gnarled
Ritual of Self-Annihilation is an apt title for this sophomore
effort: after all, we built the machines ourselves, created computers capable
of thinking and learning, and then we took our eyes off the ball. The sound
created here is stiflingly heavy and oppressive, and whatever light there may
be left has no way of getting through. The narrative can be taken in two ways:
as a warning, telling us that we’re on the road to destruction by our own
hands, or as a prediction, that this is the grim future that awaits us whatever
we do, because we’ve come too far down this rocky road to be able to turn back
and correct our mistakes.
A bleak but perfectly
executed album, blisteringly dark in the musical, philosophical, and
metaphysical senses. The prognosis presented here is bleak, but it’s also
indicative of the blindness and arrogance inherent in our species’ genetic
make-up. I shall be looking out for more of this outfit’s work in the future: for
now, this certainly fits my mood in these current, trying times, and provides a
startling reflection of the inadequacies of those we put in power.
Gnarled
Ritual of Self-Annihilation will be released on 27th
September 2019, as a download, a limited edition 12” of 100 copies in clear and
black spattered vinyl, a standard black vinyl 12” in an edition of 200, and a
CD. Pre-order now from either the Cyclic Law website:
or via the Cyclic Law
Bandcamp page:
Psymon Marshall 2019.
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