Vitauct/Crepuscular Entity - Vitauct/Crepuscular Entity split

Album: Vitauct/Crepuscular Entity split

Artist: Vitauct/Crepuscular Entity

Label: Basement Corner Emissions

Catalogue no: KV&GR/RECS #465

Tracklist:

     1.      Crepuscular Entity – Right Hand Black

     2.      Vitauct – The Diabolical Mechanism

     3.      Crepuscular Entity – Electrical Storm in an Electrical Storm

     4.      Vitauct – End to all Alive

     5.      Crepuscular Entity – The Spring Floweth Forth

     6.      Vitauct – The Exodus of the Soul

     7.      Vitauct – Madhouse

Basement Corner Emissions is a small but extremely busy little noise netlabel operating out of Portland, Oregon, which does a mighty fine job of promoting the noise genre in general, and Ken Jamison’s Crepuscular Entity in particular (as well as his label). However, Jamison doesn’t hog the glory for himself alone: most, if not all, of BCE’s releases are split recordings, meaning that other bands get to share the exposure and we get to discover some great material. In this one, Crepuscular Entity team up with Vitauct to bring us a seven track album of wildly varying noise textures, putting the lie to the notion that noise as a genre hasn’t progressed beyond relentless blast.

Dealing with CE first (as I am relatively familiar with his output), on his first contribution ‘Right Hand Black’ we’re initially battered with crashing waves of harshness in classic noise assault style, the forerunners of a much bigger and more solid tsunami of blistering red heat that aims to crush everything in its path and leave nothing standing. If you’re intent on levelling entire continents then you’d better do it properly. ‘Electrical Storm in an Electrical Storm’ is a different story altogether, a granular bedrock of crackling noise upon which explosions and detonations spark and flare in rapid succession, splitting the air and releasing glowing energies. This one will leave you gasping and reeling, its concussions physical hits upon the body. His third and last piece, ‘The Spring Floweth Forth’ isn’t so much a spring as a reservoir bursting through a dam and releasing thousands upon thousands of gallons of liquid death and destruction, laying waste to whole swathes of land. It’s unstoppable and tumultuous, a crushing wall of watery demolition.

Now, let’s turn our attention to the other contributor, Vitauct. I know absolutely nothing about this project, except that I am venturing a guess that it might be Belarussian (but don’t quote me on that). There is a web address to click on the Bandcamp page but there’s nothing there to enlighten us. But, judging by ‘The Diabolical Machine’, the first of their tracks, they have a lot to offer. This first one I would categorise as almost a hybrid genre, perhaps industrial steampunk noise, what with its repetitive clanking and steamy exhalations it reminded me of some weird contraption bolted together by some mad inventor. It’s inventive, colourful, disturbing, and yes, diabolical: a robotic leviathan jangling and rattling as it staggers jerkily on its way across some vast plain. ‘End to all Alive’ is even more mechanical mayhem, a motor running a massive engine of mass destruction, trampling and stomping on all and sundry, levelling cities, forests, and mountains with equal facility. Imagine a road-crew working outside your house but multiply it by a couple of thousand: they not only ‘fix’ the road but everything else around it, until all is a desolate, empty, and denuded wasteland. ‘The Exodus of the Soul’ is whining feedback and complaining, tortured metal, sounding like a vile and bloody extraction of the soul of a human being, a meeting of metal and flesh where the former is inevitably the winner. ‘Madhouse’ is just that – rattling metallic percussion with a maniacal, rambling, screaming male voice ranting over it, a place of disorder, mental degradation, and utter insanity. Nothing makes sense here: perhaps ultimately this is what’ll happen to us once the machines take over.

A very varied menu of interesting sounds and textures, a mix of the tried and trusted classics along with a few more adventurous dishes for those who like to expand their taste horizons. Noise, it appears, has even broader definitions than even I had suspected, and this seven-tracker is an exercise in compare and contrast, attacking from both ends of the spectrum at once. It illustrates the point that all noise is music, whatever your viewpoint on the matter is – it’s just that some is organised and some is chaotic. What this also emphasises is that even within the narrow definition of the harsh noise/noise genres, there is still a vast spectrum of expressions to be explored. On that score, this is very much a textbook example of how different artists interpret what noise is, and what it can achieve.

Purchase as a download on the link:

https://basementcorner.bandcamp.com/album/vitauct-crepuscular-entity

Psymon Marshall 2019.

Humanextermination Project / Crepuscular Entity

Album: Humanextermination Project/Crepuscular Entity

Artist: Humanextermination Project/Crepuscular Entity

Label: Basement Corner Emissions

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. 

Crepuscular Entity - Harmfulmelodics.

Album: Harmfulmelodics

Artist: Crepuscular Entity

Label: Basement Corner Emissions

Catalogue no: KV&GR/RECS #427

Tracklist:

     1.      Shiva Agonistes

     2.      Engel’s Tasting of the Hand that Fed Him.

     3.      Penitentiary of the Core Mind

     4.      Quayside Walk, Dark Waters

     5.      10:00 PM Friday, a Bottle of Malbec, and a Vinyl Copy of the Mekons’ Honky Tonkin’

Some of us, and that includes me, occasionally like to have their ears and sensibilities completely shredded by blasts of seemingly unrefined, fierce noise. Crepuscular Entity’s Harmfulmelodics serves this purpose rather well, and it left my ears and mind ringing with its raging abattoir aesthetic. Here we have five lengthy tracks (the longest of which is 40 minutes!) of freeform improvisation, creating huge chunks of raw noise-meat, bloodied and battered, dripping with viscera, and unashamedly smelling of the fresh kill. Not for the delicate of hearing or taste, these are not merely slabs of crude unprocessed cacophony, but also physical steel blades and graters, sharp and ready to slice, dice, and dismember.

It’s not hard to imagine either standing in a blast furnace or in the midst of a nuclear detonation – the smothering, claustrophobic blankets of nucleated, granular din paint a vivid picture of vaporisation right down to the atomic level. This is the sound your body makes as it disintegrates into its most basic molecular and cellular components, and what’s worse is that your consciousness remains intact even as the dissolution takes place, and your mind is unable to grasp just what’s happening until it’s too late.

The barrage is relentless, but having noted that there are nevertheless adornments and highlights added here and there to render it all that much more three-dimensional. Pain, grime, industrial decay, corruption, filth, oil and grease, rusty machinery, tortured souls, and rebellious electronics: these are the necessary ingredients of Crepuscular Entity’s elixir, a medicinal poison to reduce all into an unidentifiable sludge and bone. This is the slaughterhouse of civilisation, the clubhouse of the barbaric, the abattoir of moral codes and social niceties. The hooks are sharp and buried deeply, the blades are swinging, the blood flows freely, and we are turned to swill.

Unlike Merzbow, there’s a different set of rules being followed here. It’s not a matter of being more or less refined, or of being more polished or rough around the edges: it’s purely a difference of approach, one which arrives at a specific destination. This is in-the-moment creation, recorded and left as is, the only additions being those which were added on the day - nothing else. This is more akin to an exorcism, a cleansing, and an unleashing of controlled power, a catharsis meant to abate something deep and angry. It’s extremely visceral, a force to be felt in the pit of the stomach. This is as real as it gets.

Available from Bandcamp at the following link:

https://basementcorner.bandcamp.com/album/harmfulmelodics

Psymon Marshall 2019.