Aural Aggravation

23rd July 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

With Amps Kill’s Avulse EP, we’re in dark ambient territory here, with the emphasis on the dark, at least sonically. In terms of intent and narrative arc, it’s a little more nuanced in hue.

As the accompanying notes outline, ‘Without lyrics, Avulse guides the listener through a story. The track titles on the EP provide some context to the emotional inspiration behind the music… Avulse explores the idea of removing aspects of the self or of one’s life that are holding one back from growing and moving forward just as lizards, spiders, and insects need to shed their skin to grow. It’s a process that is often quite painful but always for the better. That pain is the core of Avulse’.

The EP’s title certainly makes sense in this context, the dictionary definition being ‘to pull or tear something away, especially a part of the body as a result of an accident or surgery’. And so it is that Amps Kill delivers something of a performative purging over the course of the EP’s five compositions.

As is the method when it comes to EP releases in recent years, the four of the five tracks on Avulse have been released individually as singles. I’m still not entirely clear on the wisdom of this approach to promotion: there’s building interest through advance singles, and then there’s emptying the tank. But then I spent a long time being accustomed to one or two singles in advance of an album’s release, and one or two more after to maintain its profile and to extend its trailing sales. Now, everything is up-front – a consequence surely being that anticipation for an EP is diminished because there’s less – if any – new material to look forward to. But I’m 50 and came to music in an era of physical releases and singles chart shows on the TV and radio, and I’m clearly get to grasp the benefits of the new way.

The first four tracks, all released as singles do, it has to be said, work better in succession than as standalone pieces. ‘Slough’, landing with a dense, hard, serrated-edged billow of noise that crashes in like a tidal wave, is heavy and oppressive. There are softer sounds beneath, but overall, it forges a thick, oppressive atmosphere, and ‘Chronophage’ plunges deeper. The title references the Corpus Clock, also known as the Grasshopper Clock, outside the library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, a clock with no hands or numerals and guarded by a metal grasshopper or locust. Amidst scrapes and hums of feedback, electronic insectoid skitterings create texture on the track, creating a scratchy, uncomfortable tension, and ‘Husk’ brings more heavy, sonorous drones and cracking distortion at the edges of dense surges of sound. It’s not entirely ambient, as there are thick, booming beats which land like detonations, and the atmosphere is tense, akin to the sound of low-flying planes and crashes and splashes like shattering metal rupture all about. It’s pretty intense, and comfortable it is not.

AA

‘Basilisk’ brings more of the same, in essence, but the thunderous beats are brought to the fore, amidst the flutter of flapping, like the sound of a thousand bats fleeing a bottomless cave. And so there is a clear sense of progression here: dark ambience transitions to throbbing industrial – in the more traditional sense, tracing a lineage to Throbbing Gristle, Coil.

Arriving at the last piece, the only one previously unreleased, there is a significant shift in tone. As Amps Kill intimates, “‘Des Pas Sur Les Cendres’ completes the idea of the group and ties all of them together. That track takes all of its musical thematic material from a piano work by Claude Debussy called ‘Des pas sur la neige’ and expands or explores it’. It sure as hell doesn’t sound like Debussy, but it very much does feel like a composition which brings the EP to a fitting close – altogether more subdued, softer, more delicate, it’s five and a half minutes of mellow ambience, albeit with a few serrated edges – which, while dark, hints at some vague sense of hope, and the sense that once the avulsion is complete, there is the potential to grow anew.

AA