#Inner Demons Records 4. Loss - She,Zombie.

Loss – She, Zombie – 3” CDR/Download – Inner Demons Records – IN0020 – 2017 https://innerdemonsrecords.bandcamp.com/album/she-zombie-ind020

1.  She, Zombie.

2.  Dead Dreams.

This disc was part of the recent, epic Inner Demons package that I recently received. This one threw me; I was expecting straight up noise or HNW when I put it on but got something totally different. Loss is a Dan Fox project that has been active since 2004.

She, Zombie uses a looped sample of a female voice from a film I assume, this never stops, as a melodic bass line plays in the background, the bass throws me back to the 1980s work of Plecid. The use of atmospheric noise shifts to melodic keyboard drones as the work progresses. The male vocal sample that takes over is rich and expressive, the noise has become delicate, atmospheric electronica as if the soundtrack to loss and sadness. As the female voice returns it’s warped more and more as the track nears its end, it becomes androgynous and more incoherent as the music gradually floods it, drowning it slowly. Only feedback is left.

Dead Dreams is esoteric in comparison to She, Zombie’s warped soundtrack, except this has aggressive electronica and beats. The use of melody is powerful and emotive. Dead Dreams contrasts upbeat rhythm to the slowness of the opening track yet ties in through the style of electronics. This is a much shorter track, but equally rich and evocative.

This release certainly grabbed me, I was impressed by the usual, strong Inner Demons presentation and strength of the work presented. Both tracks are great and worthy of purchase.

Choppy Noodles 2019.

Circular - Ghostwhite

Album: Ghostwhite

Artist: Circular

Label: Loki Foundation

Catalogue  no: LOKI 69

Tracklist:

     1.      Initial Texture

     2.      Spectrum Unfolding

     3.      Golden Amber Shades

     4.      The Iconic Circle

     5.      Abstract & Vertical

     6.      Deep in Red Contrast

     7.      A Wideness

     8.      Slight Variation

     9.      A Visual Rhythm

   10.  The Glowing Shapes

Recorded over the last three years, this is Circular’s fourth album and the ten slices of audio sculpture on display here define the project’s sweeping, elevating cosmic stylings. Here, though, I use the ‘cosmic’ advisedly: this isn’t the ‘everything is lovely, isn’t it?’ type of new age blandness the word often conjures up, but rather an admixture of the yin and the yang of universal processes: for as beautiful as a supernova appears to us, for instance, we have to remind ourselves that lying behind such an awe-inspiring sight is a tremendous catastrophic event whose magnitude and dark destructive power we can’t even begin to comprehend. Circular achieve a delicate balance between opposites, the light and the dark, using high and low registers equally. Mood is everything here.

Resonant chords sweep in majestically and swell in grandiose loops, leaping and sparkling over deep bass frameworks, grasping the listener and pulling them on a journey to regions both turbulent and static, where heated bow-shocks from the remnants of supernovae are travelling at unimaginable speeds, or where universal forces have shaped and sculpted clouds of dust and gas into beautiful columns and nebulae light-years in vastness. What’s more, what we imagine overwhelms us with its sheer magnificence and inhuman scale. This isn’t a physical journey, however - instead it’s one where the ‘spaceship’ is merely a mental construct, a psychic vehicle projecting us into uncharted territory. We’re at once reminded that the universe is vast and illimitable, and even though we’re insignificant in scale compared, we are still a part of this mighty edifice.

Some music is easier to encapsulate verbally than others: the only way to do justice to Ghostwhite is to buy and listen to its ambitious scope and breadth of vision. Standout tracks for me are ‘Initial Texture’, ‘Spectrum Unfolding’, ‘Golden Amber Shades’, ‘Slight Variation’, ‘A Visual Rhythm’, and ‘The Glowing Shapes’. This is a release of imagination and one which utilises imagination to create its fullest expression. It’s a deeply meditative opus that deserves to be listened to without any distractions.

Psymon Marshall 2019

Viviankrist - Morgenrode

Album: Morgenrøde

Artist: Viviankrist

Label: Cold Spring

Catalogue  no: CSR268CD

Tracklist:

    1.      Silent Soul

    2.      Spring Storm

    3.      Spite Spits

    4.      Morgenrøde

    5.      Black Out

    6.      Cactus

    7.      Higher Minded

    8.      Pleasure of Confusion

Viviankrist might be more familiar to some of you as Vivian Slaughter, bassist/vocalist of doom/black metal band Gallhammer. On this release from the UK’s Cold Spring label, we get to hear a ‘lighter’ expression of brutality and dissonance from her (lighter is used here in a relative sense, compared to her work with Gallhammer that is). Having described it thusly, do not for one millisecond think that this is any less challenging and in your face than her usual oeuvre; indeed I would go so far as to say that it’s a necessary counterpoint to the all-out attack of Gallhammer. This certainly isn’t a walk in the park on a nice sunny day. Whereas Gallhammer is all blackened crustiness Morgenrøde (the Norwegian for ‘dawn’) is painted in technicolour brightness but its obtuseness signifies the collapse of everything held dear, as the sun melts and the sky and earth bleed.

Album opener ‘Silent Soul’ is a blast of industrial noise, groans, and sirens, pinning Viviankrist’s manifesto to the tumbledown wall of some decayed manufacturing complex. Not as dense and lightless as you might expect given Viviankrist’s pedigree, it’s nevertheless the soundtrack to disintegration and annihilation. However, this is where it gets interesting: the following tracks diverge from here on in, cutting back on the nuclear nightmare of attenuated blasts and granular distortions and instead presents us with overtly analogue electronics, bleeps, rumblings, and twisted mutant disco beats. This approach does nothing to dilute the vein of utter despair and darkness running through every aspect of Morgenrøde.

Listening to the album I was reminded of early, pioneering electronic musical exploration, computer-driven rather than through the agency of a musician. This is not an affectation – it emphasises the ungraspable something beyond that lies behind the disruption of order and structure. It’s cold and impersonal music, and inhuman. Every piece has a steel edge, bright stabs of danger, and dissipating energy. Furthermore, despite some of its funkier, syncopated moments don’t let yourself be beguiled or deceived: this is a canvas painted with dust, rust, and waste, the hues subdued and darkened, and its atmosphere claustrophobic.

In other words it’s excellent and perfect for a Sunday afternoon.

Psymon Marshall 2019

IrisLight - Aeturnum

Album: Aeturnum

Artist: IrisLight

Available at:

https://irislight.bandcamp.com/album/aeternum?fbclid=IwAR012ypTgZgsVp7IKMD1TWV0ToaolBGnB-Qc9kf_FmoWt0YXUL4mfSvMMqs

Tracks:

1. Novus

2. Infernum

3. Spatium

4. Aeturnum.

5. Damnum

6. Transitum

7. Cecidimus

Deep, cold, isolationist drone ambient from the artist formerly known as Generic, broadcast from somewhere between the lightless abyssal depths of a vast ocean and the deserted streets of some cyclopean Lovecraftian ruin. And in that enormous space betwixt lies a complete geography of loneliness and madness, spiced with the utter meaninglessness of existence. It’s all coloured in the deepest hues of emptiness and desolation, and yet, its shimmering coruscation and scintillation holds the purest of frosty beauty, and that beauty is a wonder to behold.

In the context of these seven tracks, darkness is a relative concept. Ever visited an old building that even on the brightest of days appears to be hiding something malignant within its walls? This is the nearest description that comes anywhere near distilling the essence of the compositions here. Resonant bells and gongs, stretched out into timelessness, cutting banshee winds that penetrate deep into the marrow, and frigidity that not only steals warmth but also all thought. There’s nothing here but unbroken and unchanging landscapes, a place where a second lasts as long as a millennium, and simultaneously where a millennium lasts as long as a second.

A couple of examples will suffice. The album opener ‘Novus’ sets the tone being painted here, assailing our ears with ringing tones and wails the sources of which are obscured by a thick veil of mist. ‘Spatium’ is the slow subterranean heartbeat of this frozen realm, and album closer ‘Cecidimus’ (Latin for shrivel) is the logical endpoint – dissolution and disintegration of self and existence, the scattering of everything we were and have known to the cold reaches of the ends of the universe.

From a personal perspective, I connected on so many levels. That suspicion that there’s far more to reality than what we’re able to perceive with our senses, that perhaps there are forces of which we’re unaware shaping everything around us, and that furthermore we have no control over those forces. We’re reduced to tiny insignificant specks smaller than the atoms which compose us. Salvation and redemption are beyond us and impossible to grasp: we live in an entirely neutral universe that neither cares if we live or die. If we destroy ourselves as a species there will be no one to mark our passing, nor anyone to remember us.

Closest thing to an exposition on the beauty within futility I’ve heard in a long time. Excellent! 

Psymon Marshall Jones 2019