Aural Aggravation

Incunabula Media – 28th January 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

First new music in twenty years. Crikey. This seems to be becoming a thing: collaborators reconvene after a really, really long time. Sometimes, it’s to the frothing enthusiasm of fans flooding out of the woodwork, as in the case of Khanate, sometimes, rather less so, in the case of a number of recently reconvened acts, including Photographed By Lightning. There ought to be some fanfare, of course, but that’s now how it goes for acts on the fringes. And PBL are fringe, niche, underground, and for all of the right reasons. Photographed by Lightning is essentially a side project for aa couple of guys who have countless projects on the go at any given time. Consisting of Syd Howells – words and music, vocals and instruments, and D M Mitchell – music, instruments, painting – the duo make noise, they do drone, they do weird shit, and NO, Not Now, never reinforces this with the addition of some heavy texture.

There is something strongly emphatic about the title, that solid ‘NO’ like a foot-stomping cry of dissent. No! Not now… not ever is certainly definitive. Prematurely perhaps. Maybe: let’s discuss. Whatever happened to ‘never say never?’ Perhaps it depends on what one is saying ‘never’ to – although it seems that the things which should never come to pass, and never should again, do, and do so again, and again, with depressing predictability. If Piers Morgan was offering me a bet, I’d have probably gone with WW3 being more likely than a new album by Photographed by Lightning. But it seems the recent reissues of their previous work may have been something of a catalyst for this rekindling. And if you’ve heard those previous albums, you’ll be buckling on for a weird ride, and recent single video for ‘Hands of Humans’  gives an idea of what to expect:.

The album starts as strange as it means to go on, with ‘Act Like Nero’, a curious collage of woozy bulbous bass, percussion that sounds like the clanking of cutlery and weird, warped, ghostly vocals which drift through waves of reverb, before ‘Dead Sparrow’ arrives sounding like a Bauhaus demo or on a tape that’s been stretched and is spooling at one-and-a-half speed, or Brian Eno’s ‘Baby’s on Fire’ and Metal Machine Music being played simultaneously and captured on a condenser mic. The experience isn’t dissimilar to the first time I heard My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless, wondering if the record was warped. The vocals are twisted, and from among the polytonal strains of mangled guitar, only snippets of lyrics are discernible: ‘follow your heart / follow the dream’; ‘static in my head’: they feel incongruous and disjointed, only adding to the discombobulating effect.

Howell’s words are poetic, quirky, often abstract or otherwise seemingly stream-of-consciousness – at least when they’re audible amidst the sonic maelstrom – occasionally pithy and unexpected, with lines like ‘My social circle needs a transplant / and the donor ain’t you’.

Strolling basslines wander around most of the compositions, but they’re jerky, breaking the groove and creating tiny, nagging knots of awkwardness. NO, Not Now, never does seem to exist to challenge the listener, by needling away with relentless pokes and occasional punches of uncomfortableness reigning in from all sides, sculpted from discord, disjunction, and disparity. ‘Cantilever’ is exemplary, finding the pair making a foray onto more overtly dance-orientated territory – but doing so in a fashion reminiscent of some of The Fall’s more experimental efforts (I’m thinking ‘Mollusc in Tyrol’ from Seminal Live and the like).

Elsewhere, ‘I Wish I Could be Sure’ is theatrical, dramatic, gothic, and unsettling, a seething morass of wailing feedback and stuttering beats which eventually coalesce into a wonky motoric groove, amidst all of which Howells pulls at every psychological sinew to wrestle with his unease with himself. It’s the darkest, swampiest not-quite dance cut, and ‘Streel Echoes’ is a straight-up what-the-fuck splat of cheesy 80s synths and vocals that veer between Bowie on Outside and semi-spoken word, with more busy, chubby, but not-quite-tight bass bloomphing and bouncing about. Yes, it’s necessary to invent words to convey the experience.

The album’s final track, the seven-minute ‘Some One Thing’ is a whirling fairground nightmare of noise, which sees the krautrock-inspired repetition of a whipcracking snare blast and thudding bass yield to a whorling barrage of noise and a super-mellow-piano, while Howells achieves peak atonality in his vocal delivery. While many albums go out on an anthemic high, it feels as if the cogs are winding down and everything is slowly disintegrating as NO, Not Now, never drags its way to its conclusion. It seems fitting. With NO, Not Now, never, Photographed by Lightning seem to have gone out of their way to challenge every notion of how an album should hang together, what music should do, and to render the most uncompromising and uncomfortable aural experience, in a fashion which places them firmly within the lineage of Throbbing Gristle. NO, Not Now, never is an artistic triumph, a work created for its own ends and with no mind for audience or critical reception. And for that, it deserves applause. It’s a good album. Variable, difficult, and purely for the art.

AA