Kadaver - Necrotizing Fasciitis.

Album: Necrotizing Fasciitis

Artist: Kadaver

Label: Ho.Gravi.Malattie

Catalogue no: N/A

Tracklist:

     1.      Stage 1

     2.      Stage 2

     3.      Stage 3

     4.      Stage 4

My dear old late mother would say “Sometimes it’s good to crank up the frequencies and velocity” – in her case though it meant putting on the car radio and urging my dad to speed up a bit on our Sunday trips. However, in the context of this review it means I’ve switched my focus from dark ambient to some good old noisiness, in this case served up by Israeli project Kadaver aka Michael Zolotov.

For those of you not in the know, necrotising fasciitis (aka flesh-eating disease) is an extremely painful infection in which parts of the body die – in other words it’s just the kind of thing for a noise musician to create music about or, as I am doing, writing about while having breakfast. They do say that prevention is better than cure, and this four-track 40-minute cassette will undoubtedly do a grander job than any amount of medical proselytising could.

You don’t have to be a genius to figure out that Kadaver is telling a story here, albeit a grim one – from ‘Stage 1’ infection to ‘Stage 4’ death of the flesh and possibly the patient. The opening track is artificially ventilated breathing combined with an elevated heartbeat pumping poisoned blood through the body to spread the deadly contamination, while the mind is submerged in a swampiness befuddling all thought, before the inevitable cellular breakdown begins. That dissolution continues on to ‘Stage 2’, a malign acidic blast of unrelentingly grainy, slippery, belching, ripping white noise tearing apart the flesh, until a questioning voice says something like “Why’s this happening to me?” at the end, in perhaps a final flash of conscious clarity. ‘Stage 3’ only trends further downhill, a sustained grating machine-whirr slicing, pulverising, and liquidising until the flesh become nothing more than a pulpy unrecognisable mass swimming in a soup made of blood.

The conclusion, then, predicted from the very beginning, slowly comes to pass in ‘Stage 4’ – the interruption of cellular function and cessation of the processes necessary for life. A pulsating, rancid, and rusty grinding presages a bloody end, a final disintegration. And then… all that’s left is the flensing machine, the flesh no longer intact and now no more than a memory to be mourned.

Kadaver’s music is poetic and articulate, and definitely isn’t just noisiness for its own sake. This release has a narrative structure threading it all together, a powerful one for all its simplicity. It takes a specific type of musician to see the nuances of noise and to use it with finesse - Kadaver is just such a musician. Recommended.

Available at the link below:

https://hgmmusic.bandcamp.com/album/necrotizing-fasciitis