Niku Daruma - Love Is an Excessive Thing.

Niku Daruma – Love Is An Excessive Thing – Orb Tapes - Cassette/Download – 2023

https://nikudaruma.bandcamp.com/

https://orbtapes.bandcamp.com/

       1.    My Healing Angel.

       2.    I Only Want to be Nice.

       3.    An Excessive Thing.

       4.    The Equation of Eternal Love.

       5.    If a Great Wave Shall Fall.

Niku Daruma have a dangerous edge, I like them a lot and they might even be my Power Electronics heroines. I watched some live footage as a break to this review to inform it better. The live show is in part scary, in part funny – two women delivering 100% art. However, there is no humour in the recordings, bleak assaults and cold delivery as the exploration of the self is laid bare as fact.

Sampled, distressed dialogue opens the album, feedback and buzzing rudely interrupt, the noise lacks manners. The Noise becomes a pulsating, fractured assault and then the screaming starts. Incoherent, hysterical dialogue is thrown through pedals and becomes noise itself. Wailing drones sustain until the vocal noise erupts again. A bigger assault of sound goes off, it is forced back as the hysterical screaming goes off. That was My Healing Angels.

A restrained distortion and high-pitched drone play out over sampled dialogue, this is broken up and fractured until it is allowed to explode before further restraint and cutting into. I Only Want to be Nice feels as if it is being suffocated with a pillow for a time. As clarity of sound emerges, of electronics that are allowed to surface; it shifts through many different passages. Clear, broken electronics combine on An Excessive Thing which shifts a lot like the last track. Silence and the impact of singular electronics resonates around the sound space. The breakdown of the sound allows for silence to be punctuated by whispered vocals and hiss.

A field recording of a conversation plays, big electronics go off into hyperdrive, the key sounds are churning and droning here. Cheeky electronics cut into the main base sounds. There seem to be a shift in timeframes across the noise, sometimes it feels like something from the early 80s pulling me back in time - The Equation of Eternal Love makes for an exciting title track. The final track starts as silence interrupted by movement of recording gear until deep, bleak drones hum, feedback and tonal shifts blare out. Music plays as noise hums over it, this is an example that parallels the lives how where noise is allowed to play out on its’ own as the fighting occurs. This album has lots of long passages of noise that do the work of the work until the vocals go off.

Love Is an Excessive Thing experiments on itself, ideas collide, interact and form new ideas, it is an ever-changing entity and I like where the project is going.

Army of One 2023.