Nikita Fuji - Espaces

Album: Espaces

Artist: Nikita Fuji

Label: Hannah

Catalogue no: N/A

Tracklist:

     1.      Espace 1

     2.      Espace 2

     3.      Espace 3

     4.      Espace 4

     5.      Espace 5

     6.      Espace 6

It’s a brave person who decides to base a conceptual ambient album around a work composed by one of the masters of 20^th century minimalism, and even braver when that work is one of Estonian composer Arvo Pärt’s works, in this case ‘Fratres’. The original is itself a sublime work, a masterpiece combining the simple with the seemingly complex, so to even contemplate the act of taking a part of it and expanding on its sublimity is astounding.

I’ll be honest – I am not much for classical instrumentation and music. I find classical music too intrusive, too much of an imposition on my aural reality. I am not saying that it’s bad, just that I don’t understand it and my brain can’t process it in the same way that I do with dark ambient.

This is a roundabout way of saying that Fuji’s interpretation, even if it’s only a slice of the original and so taken out of context, feels transcendent in a way that Pärt’s work doesn’t. There again, they’re two completely different beasts, and like I averred above my preferences are nothing to do with the quality of the original – this is merely how *I* respond to it. Espaces is essentially one track divided into six parts but ultimately the divisions are meaningless – taken as a whole this album can be interpreted as a journey through the cold, lightless regions of the earth, places where the sun hides its face for months at a time and, even when it does shine, the temperature declines to rise much above freezing. Frigid winds blowing is the only form of movement here, and they carry with them the icy dust of ages and eons, obliterating and obscuring the landscape, making features barely perceptible or even recognisable. In those times when the microscopic particles cease their turbulence and settle, the wind lessens, and the skies clear, movement doesn’t entirely desist: look up and we see the dance of even tinier particles shimmer across the dome of the heavens. Behind the veil stars twinkle frostily, their light as pure and unalloyed as we are likely to see.

This is serene and beautiful, but it also carries the seeds of darkness within it. In spite of how peaceful and tranquil it may appear, for the most part that’s only a superficial thing. Snow and ice, especially when sculpted by natural forces, can look spectacular, but cold can also bring death. Regardless of how fine and uplifting this music sounds and feels, that potentially lethal element lurks behind every note here. The glacial elegance portrayed here is alluring, enticing, but it’s perhaps fortunate that we are experiencing it from afar, at many removes. This is definitely a thing of beauty, but it comes with sharp edges.

Support this new label by going here to purchase your copy of this digital only album:

https://hannahmusic.bandcamp.com/album/espaces

Psymon Marshall 2019

Monocube - Substratum

Album: Substratum

Artist: Monocube

Label: Malignant Records/Cyclic Law

Catalogue no: TumorCD120/137^th Cycle

Tracklist:

     1.      Sehnsucht

     2.      Prima Materia

     3.      Luft

     4.      Visiones V

     5.      The Opposite of Nadir (feat. Antti Litmanen)

     6.      Opaque

     7.      Actio in Distans

     8.      Limen (feat. Visions)

Yes, you read that correctly – this album is a co-release between Malignant Records and Cyclic Law, two very fine purveyors of dark and industrial ambient. Monocube broadcast their brand of darkness from the Ukraine and on this outing are assisted by contributions from Antti Litmanen of Arktau Eos and Frederic Arbour’s Visions (he also manages Cyclic Law).

Shake the bones, inhale the sulphurous vapours, blow the bone trumpets, stare into the sacred black flame dancing on the altar. The eight darkly ambient/occult tracks here have emerged from deep underground, from the shadowed spaces where celebrants enact ancient forbidden rites in the deepest and most secret of primordial caverns: places where the gods were worshipped before mankind had even come into existence. The sounds and textures here are truly subterrestrial, the exhalations of entities far beyond our abilities to comprehend. Washes of whispering winds and voices surface from even deeper regions, emanating from times and dimensions separated from us by vast temporal distances. As lazy as it may be for a reviewer to borrow a[n overused] label but the term Lovecraftian is perhaps the nearest I can get to encapsulating the aura this music stifles us with.

Even if it can be labelled thusly, perhaps it’s not the nightmare visions of the creatures themselves that are being conjured up – it’s the terror inherent in the idea that there are those humans who are willing to manifest them into material existence in the first place. These are the agitated harbingers announcing their imminent arrival. The poisonous, suffocating vapours seeping from the fissures beneath our feet are highly disturbed, their effects distorting and twisting. The weight of the imminent catastrophe to be visited on our reality crushes sanity, and heavy black atmospheres build up into gargantuan waves ready to break and submerge all. The world will drown, and the light will be extinguished.

Monocube are either issuing a warning or an invitation. Either way, it speaks of a bleak, dismal future, where the only light available is from a dim, cold, and dying sun. Even the stars will flee from the sight of a devastated earth, and a starless night will be our only companion. Warmth will abandon us, and in its place will be an imperative for survival. The prognosis, however, remains grim.

Essential listening for those times when you suffer the nihilist blues – this will set you straight back along the path of blissful doom and gloom. 

Psymon Marshall 2019.

Visions - Temples.

Album: Temples

Artist: Visions

Label: Cyclic Law

Catalogue no: 119^th Cycle

Tracklist:

     1.      Traces

     2.      Murmur

     3.      Lamentation

     4.      Ultima

     5.      Temples

     6.      Aura

     7.      Continuum

After an extremely deceptively quiet start, this album opens out into a glorious essay on sustained dark atmospherics and esoteric visions, taking the listener on a mind-expanding journey through the inner recesses of our own thoughts and dreams. Of all the music I’ve heard and reviewed recently Temples is my standout album – deeply meditative, inviting us to look inwards rather than outwards, speculating perhaps on the idea that the spaces inside our minds are as infinite and beautiful as the vastness of the universe around us. After all, didn’t Carl Sagan say “We are made of star stuff, we are a way for the cosmos to know itself”? The reflection of the macro contained within the micro – in effect, ‘as above, so below’.

Deeply resonant chords ebb and flow in continuous cycles, the very breath of the cosmos itself. Perhaps, too, these are the thoughts of the macrocosm made material and intelligible, so that we can be a part of the myriad cycles and evolutions it undergoes. And, contained within each piece, are hints of boundless and illimitable spaces, hints enough for our finite brains to comprehend without breaking apart. The vistas alluded to here are both staggeringly exquisite and devastatingly terrifying. They are simultaneously savage and edifying. We are witness to both the dance of colour and light, and the stately encroachment of darkness and gravity.

Beyond that, however, is that this set has shades of what I term the Deepsoul – a resonant frequency that jibes with everything contained within the definition of divine kinship with the universe at large. It is spine-tinglingly simple in construction yet deeply affecting in effect. There is complexity here but it is simply delineated and expounded. It goes beyond incense and paraphernalia, fire, chant, and ritual, and on into true communion. Try the title track for starters, ‘Temples’ – a ringing, siren-like invitation to divest oneself of material notions, to leave the fleshly body behind, and to become united with the very star stuff that is both inside and outside us and to make those essential – no, urgent - connections.

I can honestly say that I actually had shivers running up and down my spine whilst listening to this album. Every one of these seven tracks is consciousness elevating and soul-enriching, cutting through the dross of the everyday to reveal the dangerous beauty that lies within our grasp if only we’re brave enough to reach out despite the perils.

Ratings are meaningless, but if I were to assign it one it would be 10/10. 

Psymon Marshall 2019. 

Dødsmaskin - Ødelagt.

Album: Ødelagt

Artist: Dødsmaskin

Label: Malignant Records

Catalogue no: TumorLP125

Tracklist:

     1.      Svart Tundra

     2.      Jernguden

     3.      Det Som Ødelegger

     4.      Isolasjon

     5.      Kaldere Nå

Dødsmaskin, which translates to Death Machine, is a Norwegian duo, and this is their fourth full-length album, and here Ødelagt (Broken) is not so much about in your face industrial chaos as it is about stealthily creeping doom and death, first glimpsed from afar – and it’s about the quieter gulfs in between just as much as the noise itself.

This vinyl LP is divided into two very distinct halves, atmospherically-speaking. Side One leans more toward industrial/death ambient, starting with ‘Svart Tundra’ (Black Tundra): vast, cavernous echo chambers secreted somewhere away from the prying eyes and sensibilities of brightly-lit daylight normality, a place where the minutest of clicks, scrapes, and crackles take on an intensely black, malignant immensity and weight, soul-crushing and life extinguishing. Rats scurry, insects squirm amongst filth and decay, and the air is a miasma of disease and corruption. ‘Jernguden’ (Iron God) begins scratchily, before a dark rain pours down heavily, drenching us in decomposition and disintegration. Ending the first side we have ‘Det Som Ødelegger’ (That Which Destroys) which announces its intentions by warning us with a shrill whistle right from the start – which then evolves into a hovering death, inches away from our heads, its whirring blades looking for a taste of blood, flesh, bone, and sinew. What makes it even more terrifying is that we’re engulfed in a putrid darkness, a black-hole so dark that not even light can penetrate, and we can only detect its presence from the fetid stink these machines exude.

Side Two is a different creature altogether. The emphasis here is on a lighter atmosphere, but nevertheless the darkness hasn’t quite fled. It’s more structured, less reliant on abstraction and more on a sweeping sense of the cinematic and visual. Indeed, on the opening track ‘Isolasjon’ (Google translates it as Insulation, but perhaps Isolation would be better) we’re treated to shimmering ringing tones carrying an actual tune on its back before degrading into an endlessly-building seismic wave of granular noise that threatens to overwhelm. Just before it breaks, it abruptly disappears totally, leaving a ringing, deafening, wondering silence in its wake. As a finale, ‘Kaldere Nå’ (Cooler Now) brings us short, spooky, repetitive guitar phrases which sound as if they’re ghostly voices out of the distance – are they being sung by someone or are they merely recordings from the past, a past consigned to the past like ashes in a wind?

This wonderful album is awash with dankness, decay, filth, and degradation, even in its ‘lighter’ moments. What it says to me is that death doesn’t have to come for us in the dark – it can claim us on the brightest of days, at the happiest of times. In short, just remember to keep your eyes open.

Psymon Marshall 2019.

Oblivion Guest - The Light In the Black Hole.

Album: The Light in the Black Hole

Artist: Oblivion Guest

Label: Self-released via Bandcamp

Catalogue no: N/A

Tracklist: 

1. The Light in the Black Hole

2. Mind Awake, Body Asleep

3. Digital Duress

4. If We Should Fail… (Black Hole Mix)

5. After the Fire

6. We Need to Go (Black Hole Mix)

7. Faster than Deception

8. Rapture (Black Hole Mix)

9. Bazille Murder (Black Hole Mix)

10. Fallen Men

11. Into Chaos

12. Last Gasp

13. Strangled Beauty

Oblivion Guest is musician, producer, composer, and performer Hunter Barr, the founder member of KnifeLadder along with Andrew Trail and the late John Murphy. He also works and tours with Black Light Ascension, Antivalium, This Is Radio Silence, and Naevus. This present work is the full soundtrack to a performance in Dresden of ‘The Light in the Black Hole’, by Barr and dancer Una Shamaa as part of Tanzwoche 2019.

This totally surprised me, as I was expecting something completely different – but don’t be put off by that because, in spite of being composed of thirteen electronic, even danceable, tracks, it’s every bit as atmospheric and mood inducing as any free-form ambient opus. Yes, there’s percussion, down and dirty bass rhythms, and ‘traditional’ song structures, but these pieces are aimed solely at a radioactive and mutated post-apocalyptic dancefloor of the future. Here you dance while you decompose.

The sound is dense, big, layered and for the most drives along at a behemothic clip, barrelling towards its inexorable date with destruction and dissolution. Dust and rubble trail in its wake, buildings collapse, seas dry up, fires burn, storms roil continuously, the acidic rains are never-ending, and the only living things left alive are misshapen, diseased, and distorted parodies of what were once the fauna and flora of the green earth. The land is barely recognisable, and the very air is smog-engulfed, polluted, and poisoned. However, there are also quiet and more contemplatively reflective moments too, brief respites from the relentless hopelessness of it all – the rays of a putrid sun shine through fleeting breaks in the clouds.

Favourite tracks: ‘Mind Awake, Body Asleep’, rife with swampy beats and harsh percussion; ‘Last Gasp’, a blanket of jet-blast electronics sweeping catastrophically and convulsively over an already-beaten land, and the last track ‘Strangled Beauty’, a haunting, keening lament, or perhaps the hint of a promise to return to what the world had once been. It’s all here – life, death, and the possibility of rebirth

The album will be available from August 2nd 2019 at Oblivion Guest’s Bandcamp page here https://oblivionguest.bandcamp.com/ as a CD and digital download,

Psymon Marshall 2019.

Suffer In April, more French Greatness?

Suffer In April – Femme Fatale – demo  - 2019 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nESUZ5ztBg

1 L'ennivrance des sens 

2 les oubliées de la lumiere 

3 Tinté de lumiére sa peau comme un diament  

4 Le voyage sants retour (Snix Cover) 

5 Obédience au plus grand des chagrin

6 l'apogé de l'art du meurtre 

7 Femme Fatal . 

8 Transcendance Nocturne 

9 Eux deux 

10 Viande Froide 

11 Carne

Suffer in April is a French project by Patrick Andre. I decided to review this project because I was just sent some links/pestered via messenger over a period, today I clicked on one and I can’t believe what I am hearing. Femme Fatale seems to share the same forward-thinking attitude that made early Cremation Lily so excellent. It’s Harsh Noise overtones and deep keyboard instrumentation mixed with pained vocals and sharp sounds. There’s also Guitar mixed in at some points, the quieter passages are strong, the vocals are different – they chant, wail, roar and are generally solid throughout, maybe even next level. Later there are some great female vocal harmonies that are looped over vortexes of distortion.  The later more straight up harsh noise pieces are also music to my ears. There are moments of cinematic greatness here and some passages of evocative beauty happening there, this is a very strong recording, it’s sonic vocabulary is at once simple and sophisticated. This short review is a warning, a warning of potential or maybe present forward-thinking greatness. Haven’t decided which one it is yet, I'm still blown away.

Choppy Noodles 2019

Tribes of Medusa - Lilith Enshrined.

Album: Lilith Enshrined

Artist: Tribes of Medusa

Label: Sombre Soniks

Catalogue no: N/A

Tracklist:

      1.      Lilith Enshrined

According to Jewish folklore, Lilith was the first wife of the Biblical Adam, not Eve. In the original rendering of the creation of humankind myth she came into being alongside Adam at exactly the same time, and not from any part of her husband (unlike Eve, who was created from one of Adam’s ribs while he slept). She was an entirely separate and individual creation. However, she turned out to be something of a wilful woman who rejected God and her husband and so was, naturally, demonised by subsequent generations and portrayed as a baby-killer. Christianity especially has some major issues with disobedient and upstart women, and so the traditional myth of Adam and Eve was promulgated to the exclusion of any mention of Lilith (and yet, Eve was responsible for the Fall of Man). However, in some of the left-hand path systems she’s been adopted as an agent of sexual domination and feminism, and the Great Mother of Daemons.

On a more earth-bound level she’s the inspiration behind Brooklyn, New York’s dark ambient/industrial Tribes of Medusa project. And here she is in all her chaotic glory, a truly dark avatar of all that is dangerous to the patriarchal conception of what women should be – in other words, free, an utterly dynamic force of nature, bounden to nothing and no one, and ultimately free to choose her own destiny and path in life. She is the apotheosis of womankind, guardian of the procreative and life-giving powers, nurturing, strong, and independent of mind and spirit.

Tribes of Medusa get right to it on this 30-minute slab of blackened maelstrom – guttural bass rumblings and slashes of guitar announce her presence, the goddess dressed in red and black, ready to seduce, to mesmerise, and to conquer. Her spirit is earth-born, rising up from the very bowels of the world. Seismic chords crash and clash, wrenching and catastrophic: mountains tremble and empires fall. Fury and ferocity, madness and passion, erupt violently, emphasising Lilith’s supremacy in exciting the desires of men. She is a roiling, tumbling, unstoppable juggernaut: this is the Dark Goddess in her prime.

If you want to be battered continuously by a wall of cacophonic industrial guitar noise, then this is the one for you. It’s relentless, endlessly crashing against the shores of your mind and soul. This paean to the original woman, the original feminine archetype, is all that it should be and more. Lilith deserves your worship.

Available at https://sombresoniks.bandcamp.com/album/lilith-enshrined in digital format and also from https://sombresoniks.com/home

Psymon Marshall 2019

More Thomas LaRoche Insanity - Creep of Paris and House Dust #1!

Thomas LaRoche. House Dust #1. 2018 Edition of 25. Research Laboratories.

https://researchlaboratories.tumblr.com/

      a.       House Dust #1

      b.       House Dust #1

Thomas LaRoche is one half of Active Denial who produced two amazing cassettes in 2018 and 2019. House Dust is one of his many other projects on Research Laboratories. This short tape is in a limited edition of 25. It’s described as Musique Concrète; wavering tonal frequency continues in a steady line whilst metal scrapings drag out around, through and over it. Energy build as the scrapings and clattering grow. The scraping is relentless and becomes intensified as its’ sharpness rises, this is raw. I assumed the programme was repeated on the other side, but the tonal frequency seems to dominate the clatter. The tonal noise eventually takes over and it’s done.

I like this, another obscure gem from Research Laboratories.

C.O.P. Gavia Immer. Cassette. Research Laboratories.  https://researchlaboratories.tumblr.com/

a. Untitled.

b. Untitled.

Whereas House Dust was a new tape with hand painted cassette case and artwork inside, Creep of Paris – Gavia Immer is way rawer. It’s a recycled cassette that is spray painted black, the cassette case is covered in packing tape with the name written on in pen and some details printed off and stuck on the back. Also, Gavia Immer is another name for a Common Loon or A Great Northern Diver bird.

Old instrumental Jazz music plays, it has some amazing drumming, this plays out until some recorded dialogue appears over a microphone. A man and a woman converse. A woman then talks, it seems to shift through different passages of dialogue with different characters. How old this is I don’t know, how it was obtained is a mystery. Old music takes over, the crackle of the old vinyl very prevalent as it dies off.

The B Side, contains old film music spliced up between passages of Field Recordings of inaudible dialogue amongst crowds, the two are cutup and play for periods of time with each taking over for a duration. This just continues, but it works and is the most effective side of the release, the relentless repetition of the two sources is good. It continues until a piano recordings and jazz play out. I found I was able to get into this more that the first side, I engaged more..

All in All it’s been an enjoyable morning of experiments from the Laboratories.

Choppy Noodles 2019.

MUUR - Bod album review.

Album: Bod

Artist: MUUR

Label: Cyclic Law

Catalogue no: 143^rd Cycle

Tracklist:

      1.      Bod

MUUR’s Bod is composed of a single track of deeply resonant, atavistic, subterranean, and primeval ritual occult ambient, rising up from the deepest chasms. Strangely-garbed and faceless figures huddle in secret temples, bathed in the dim light of sacred fires and billows of incense, singing chants of abysmal power accompanied by instruments made from bone. This is the sound of tectonics shifting, of the planet realigning itself into a new paradigm, of ages-old power preparing itself for a renewal and resurgence into the light of the modern era. Tinkling finger-cymbals, guttural throat-singing reciting ancient texts that were once buried with our ancestors, massive fuzzed-out guitar chords, all set against swathes of deep sweeping bass chords and primitive rhythms. It’s like listening to the very earth itself reawakening a long-entombed power, a power that has been biding its time until all the right elements are properly aligned, a calling up of preternatural entities to wrest the world from the desecrators and defilers.

This really is the most extraordinary and the most glorious piece of ritual ambient I’ve heard recently. This goes straight to the limbic system in our brains, stimulating our most primitive instincts and connections. This is after all the purpose of rituals such as these – to forge links with those aspects of ourselves and our world that we’ve forgotten or lost. More than that, those deep subterranean voices and bass rumbles are felt deeply, sometimes physically in the pit of one’s stomach. These aren’t some empty ritualistic gestures aimed at some abstract deity: no, the entities addressed here are far older, far more real, and far more deeply embedded in the fabric of our reality than we are wont to acknowledge. These beings or, rather, spirits are intertwined with the physical matter that constitutes our planet. Even so, they are capricious in nature and they are not beholden to us: we are merely passengers.

MUUR’s Bod is goose-pimple-inducing, and the hairs on the back of my neck and arms stood up, plus shivers ran down my spine. It’s a reaction that’s a result of our mind and body remembering – the resurfacing of our most hidden memories that modern society and civilisation have covered over with unnecessary detritus. It’s a reminder too of what we’ve forgotten, and what we’ve lost, as well as a signpost to a deeper reality.

Let the gods of the elder times sweep you along and bring you face to face with your ancestors – you’ll be grateful for it.  

Out on 30^th July and available as a CD in an edition of 500 from Cyclic Law’s Bandcamp page here: https://cycliclaw.bandcamp.com/album/bod

Bardoseneticcube & Shinkiro - Beyond the Edge of the Universe.

Album: Beyond the Edge of the Universe

Artist: Bardoseneticcube & Shinkiro

Label: Zhelezobeton

Catalogue no: ZHB-LXXVIII

Tracklist: 

1. Messenger from the Galactic Core

2. Dark Matter

3. The Void

4. Ultimate Fate of the Universe

Here we have four lengthy pieces of cosmic dark ambient that comfortably stretch across a canvas as broad and as deep as the universe itself. It amazes me at times how a species as planet-bound as homo sapiens can create such vivid, painterly, and sculptural depictions in sound of environments none of us have ever seen up close, and which we are unlikely ever to visit. I am disinclined to believe in astral projection but music like this makes me question my assumptions about that – how else to explain such mind-numbingly expansive and dramatic vistas of dark beauty as detailed here?

I cannot imagine a place more breathtaking, electrifying, or terrifying than the galactic core of the Milky Way. A nexus of out-of-control gravity culminating in a supermassive black hole, where stars orbit around it at speeds barely comprehendible, where matter and light are swallowed and spewed out violently at thousands of miles a second. The sheer ferocity is itself a grandiose and ineffable spectacle, worthy of our awe and dread in equal amounts. The opening track thankfully lets us observe the unfolding events from a safe distance, the slow dance outlined in sustained chords in major and minor keys that ring out across the inestimable distances whilst being accompanied by stretched-out bell-like tones. Even from here though, the pull of the forces at work is strong enough to be felt, giving us a tiny but exhilarating taste of what it’s like to be insignificant.  It is both inspiring and hideously alarming.

We’re in even more mysterious territory in ‘Dark Matter’, that hidden and puzzling gravitational force shepherding the observable matter in our universe. Looping mutterings and grumblings form its backdrop, with exclamations of sparkling crackles punctuating it in random bursts; the very components of the invisible fabric holding reality together, unseen and unfelt but essential. Fading in gradually the voice of the universe asserts itself, eventually breaking and crashing upon the shores of matter, sparking chaos and creation, and magnificent spectacle. It almost overwhelms but pulls back before everything fatally breaks apart.

Now we’re confronted by ‘The Void’ – a place of unutterable emptiness (for fact fans, there is actually a real void in space, called The Great Nothing or the Boőtes Void, where there are very few galaxies and is mostly unoccupied space). Bass gratings and bursts of metallic percussion fight through swelling chords, a clash between chaos and orderliness. This inevitably leads us into ‘The Ultimate Fate of the Universe’, something which none of us wish to contemplate let alone being capable of imagining. A state where matter loses its cohesion and loses out to the irresistible force of immense gravity, coalescing into the very infinitesimally-small singularity the universe began as. This final track is a lament for all that was and is now passing beyond the call of anyone’s memory. From darkness it was birthed, and into darkness it falls once again. 

‘Beyond the Edge of the Universe’ makes me want to buy a sensory-isolation tank and dissolve into non-being whilst listening to and experiencing this. Strangely enough, in spite of the destructive powers that lie behind the creation and continuance of the universe and their portrayal here, I find it all somehow comforting. Not entirely sure whether that makes me a grumpy nihilistic crank but it suits me just fine. 

Available from Zhelezobeton’s Bandcamp in digital format (https://zhelezobeton.bandcamp.com/album/beyond-the-edge-of-the-universe ) and also available in a limited factory-pressed CD in 4-panel digipak in an edition of 300 plus a limited edition tape of 50 with fold-out inner card and download code. 

Psymon Marshall 2019

Entre Vifs - Offrande et Partage.

Entre Vifs – Offrande et Partage. CD. Aussaat. 2019. Aussaat 10.

https://www.facebook.com/Aussaatundernte/

https://bruitiste.tumblr.com/

https://www.facebook.com/EntreVifs/

     1.   Holidays in Stahlstadt.

     2.   Red Fruits.

     3.   A Benevolent Storm Front.

     4.   Chaorgia Pantomachia.

Bonjour mes amis français, merci de m'envoyer un autre album d'Entre Vifs sur Aussaat Records !!!! (Google Translate est génial !!).

After the excellent Ontologie, I was converted to the work of Entre Vifs; their work remains some of the best I’d heard this year. The booklet to Offrande contains images of landscapes, architecture and shots documenting Entre Vifs amazing self-made electronic devices that make up their sounds. This album refers to recent legal fights by the project and a resurgence of activity in 2018. Offrande et Partage references Leonard Cohen’s Anthem (The Future) in its’s sleeve notes. The work was performed live in their Noisecraft Workshop in March – April 2018, these are excerpts of sessions 49B, 50A, 50B and 51A.

The opening track Holidays in Stahlstadt builds through ambient echoes in its’ slow creepiness that drags itself out, it’s doesn’t have the immediate massive attack of the last album. It’s heavy on haunted atmospherics and seems to wind itself back and down sometimes to a reduced palette of sound in order to grow again. Although I am immediately aware that the sounds are those of Zorin and Kobaian that make Entre Vifs, the track drags in sound, creating a very different type of brutality. It also seems to throw sounds around the room demonstrating epic dynamics to the point where I thought there was background noise around me, this builds to sonic hysteria - this long death of an opening track demonstrates the sophistication that exists and excites me within the sound of Entre Vifs.

Red Fruits seems to build on the Slow Death of sound. It attempts to form a sense of percussion within itself only to start dragging and barking out choking sounds as if it is in combat within itself only to then project that combat as sound towards the listener, this frequently happens throughout the album. There’s a wide scope of distance that’s played with, some of the track exists in the distance and projects to the forefront through steps of sound. It addresses its own failure by the recurrence of noise as percussion/beat and how it doesn’t become a noise artist using beats and making pointless EBM/techno stuff is again impressive. The work drags itself down to chokes, croaks and echoes; it splutters and fades.

The dragging and the dying seem to become intensified for A Benevolent Storm Front, the sound seems to pull itself and explode continuously, strip back suddenly and converse with itself – it’s very brutal, not settling on a formula, it seems to reformulate and reshape itself. The haunted sound echoes and resonates in its full form. Things shift non-stop, background and foreground communicate with each other continuously. Brutal interruptions lead new sonic formations, sometimes a rhythm tries to start, but that is warped and flattened to noise.

They save the biggest until last, Charargia Pantomachia (Your Attention Please) scrapes itself into action and all hell breaks loose. Low-level and High-Level assault share shifts in full distorted metal abuse.  Charargia does seem to shift into even more territories of sound than the others, it has the same yet even more exaggerated parallels in sound but never stays in one place for too long. I like the injections of Harsh Noise blasts put into the sound, they scream and interrupt.

This is an angrier album than Ontologie, it doesn’t let you zone in on the massive assaults of electronic and metal noise, it shifts around too much, you’re frequently pulled in and moved around with the work. The destructive qualities of the album literally create cracks to let the light in. I want more Entre Vifs in my collection, I will have to go backwards and get it all because I want to know, were they always this good, or did it take decades to get this good? Epic album, ace progression, do get it.

Choppy Noodles 2019.

Krzysztof Penderecki - Kosmogonia

Album: Kosmogonia

Artist: Krzysztof Penderecki

Label: Cold Spring

Catalogue  no: CSR238CD

Tracklist: 

1. Kosmogonia

2. De Natura Sonoris II

3. Anaklasis

4. Fluorescences

This has already been out for two years, yet I am only now reviewing it because it’s timeless in a way that many more recent releases will never be. If you want a masterclass in how to create chill, dread-laden atmospheres or a lesson in how to conjure genuine bone-freezing and intensely dark music, then I suggest that you grab yourself a copy of this CD immediately. 

Cold Spring may have issued this back in 2017 but the original vinyl release came out in 1974, when the concept of ‘dark ambient’ hadn’t even been formed in embryo. I distinctly remember that after hearing this for the first time I felt somewhat shell-shocked – this was like nothing I’d ever heard before, and knowing that it had all been created using traditional instruments and the human voice only intensified my astonishment. 

It is layered and dense, with wave after wave of crescendo upon crescendo, frantic strings and percussion battling for supremacy, cut through with operatic voices and choral passages that crash in upon themselves and shatter. Quiet plains of bowed sound shimmering like a heat hazes in the far distance, broken only by staccato string interjections and exclamations of focussed pandemonium, only to be finally subsumed by tsunamis of crushing brass instrumentation, slowly dissipating into ringing tones which further deteriorates into haunted silences. It is anarchic, restless, and unsettled, and also serene, relaxed, and tranquil, but above all it is complex, confusing, perplexing, disturbing, frightening, and unnerving   

This description is just a taster of the wonders contained herein, even if they’re drawn in shades of disquietude, insanity, imbalance, and even fragility. It’s a series of miniature explosions, designed to destroy equilibrium, heighten expectations, and batter the psyche, with perhaps the ultimate goal of shattering the latter. It’s challenging (a word I don’t like using ordinarily), and if you accept what it’s confronting you with then there are rich rewards to be had. This is the kind of birthplace from where the present dark ambient and industrial scenes emerged – the roots are right here, and even today they remain flourishing and strong.

If I was to highlight one of the tracks here it would be the titular one, ‘Kosmogonia’ – a magnum opus of unsettling majesty that in turn elevates and crushes. It is the collision of light and dark, matter and anti-matter, annihilation and creation. It is all and nothing. It is beauty and ugliness. It is, simply, stunning. 

Essential listening. 

Psymon Marshall 2019