Crawl of Time
– Growing Into the Fertile Dirt of Her Terrible Hidden Memories – CD – Phage Tapes
– PT:374 – 2022.
https://crawloftime.bandcamp.com
https://phagetapes.bandcamp.com
1.
No Love
(Intro).
2.
Contagion
(You Were Always the Victim).
3.
Tears
of A Clown.
4.
Sophia.
5.
What's
Yours Is Mine.
6.
Soledad.
7.
Growing
In the Fertile Dirt of Her Terrible Hidden Memories.
I was lucky enough to see Crawl of Time play
live last week at a small venue in Nottingham. Crawl of Time, for this show was
Samuel Torres (Crawl of Time) and Mackenzie Chami (Koufar, God Is War). I'd had
that feeling before, without ever hearing them that I would love what I was going
to see (Music buyer sixth sense), so I bought 3 releases from them before the show,
this cd was one of them.
The live performance featured heavy electronics
(distortion and drones) and Beats that were handled by Mackenzie Chami. Beats in
Power Electronics is tricky as it can very quickly and easily turn to shit, but
here, it was just right. They split vocals, Torres did the majority of them, it
had a similar gargled effect to this album and Chami's vocals would take over for
a time. There were no visuals, just pure, raw sound. The impact of who they were
didn't hit me until I read up on them. Both have worked in Koufar and Terror Cell
Unit, Disgust and Crimes of the Crown together.
As an album, Growing in the Fertile Dirt
of Her Terrible Hidden Memories, is sonically very ambitious. The Intro track,
No Love, echoes, ruminates and sets a nightmarish tone to the album, Torres's
familiar vocal comes in and delivers the dialogue. Sharp keyboard patterns play
out with a slow, pulse beat backing it all. As sound the vocal is shrill on the
layers of bass and drone, the vocal is effectively assaultive. The keyboard drones
are left to play out at the end. Contagion (You Were Always the Victim) radiates
some menacing electronics. Samples and noises eventually begin to go off in the
background, as these grow the sound becomes increasingly menacing as if stuck inside
a bad dream. The electronics do a lot of work, building the scenario for the vocals
to work upon.
The beat returns on Tears of a Clown and
it works well. The vocal rips on top of it, drones play out through it all. As the
vocals die off, the drone becomes a melody, this is an example of the album flexing
its' scope, stretching out. Lengthy twinges of beauty come through on here. Sophia
submerges fully into melodic lines and ambient atmospheres and shows us one end
that the sound of Crawl of Time can go to. The assault of What's Yours Is Mine,
is a pulsating beat and shouting, the shout is different in that it is untreated
without the warbling effect usually employed by Torres. The drone is slight, the
work is done by the beat and the vocal. Eventually the vocal fades and the remaining
components play out for a long time.
The nastiness plays out to church bells on
Soledad (when translated from Spanish means loneliness or solitude) it feels like a rant on
a landscape created by the sound, the combination of sounds feels like a field recording
that eventually chokes out and ends. The final track is the title track which lies
between ambient hostility and low-level industrial bleakness that strike some good
balances of tension on which to end the album.
I question if the album is about someone
in a relationship, the discovery of that person's past over the course of time that
the people were (or are still) together, either way, it provides good concept and
food for thought about the album. It is also possible that this album is an expansive
work of nightmarish brilliance.
Nothing and Nobody 2025.
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