Aural Aggravation

5th April 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s been almost four years since I encountered Alaxander Stordiau, when I covered the single release by The Original Magnetic Light Parade, a collaboration between Stordiau and Edinburgh man, Harold Nono, on perennially oddball label Bearsuit Records.

With minimal info about that release – and not much more about this one, I’m mostly left to grapple with the music as it presents itself, with minimal content. This is good: and so is this EP.

A brief Internet delve uncovers that the material on this this EP was initially released a year ago, as part of an album-length work bearing the same title, slipped out on Soundcloud. Now, there are plenty of albums I think would have made decent EPs – or 7” singles – but there’s no reason to believe Stordiau has whittled this set down due to any issues with quality, and it does seem that it’s often easier to pitch an EP than an LP in our attention-deprived times. If I were to go all-out on a personal obsession, I’d make a greater deal of the fact that this four-track cut has aa running time of twenty-three minutes. There’s nothing to suggest Stordiau is a fan of William S. Burroughs or otherwise beholden to the ‘23 Mythos’, but the fact it does have a playing time of twenty-three minutes was of note to me, simply because. The twenty-threes just keep on coming.

And so to the music itself. ‘Fear Merges Easily’ is something of a teaser, an introduction, an atmosphere-builder, with wavering synth undulations creating a nice, even flow over a shuffling beat that sits off in the background. It’s got groove, but it’s subtle, and overall, it’s pretty mellow. It doesn’t ‘do’ much: one gets the impression it’s not supposed to, and nor is it necessary for it to do more. It’s vaguely background, it has some classic eighties electro and krautrock elements to it, and enough texture to keep it engaging.

‘Hearing the House Breathing’, stretching out to almost eleven minutes is the centrepiece and defining track here, and what’s interesting is how it’s centred around a core motif and built upon a solid spine of subdued beats, pulsating bass, and nagging synth shapes, but shifts and moves through a succession of segments. It’s dancey, but at the same time, it isn’t. and there are gasping, whispering vocals wheezing beneath the waves of undulating analogue ripples. Around the mid-point, it breaks into a more energetic mood, the bubbling synths bouncing over a lively robotic electro beat dominated by the whip-cracking snap of a vintage drum machine snare sound. Everything gets quite busy, and a shade hazy around this point, there’s a lot going on, and not all of it synchronous. I can’t be alone in finding this kind of busyness induces not a trance-like state, but one of feeling dizzy and vaguely overwhelmed, an experience not dissimilar to sitting in a busy pub or coffee shop and being unable to focus on reading or the conversation in front of my face for the distraction of all the babbling noise filling the air all around.

Things take a turn for the eerie, the proggy, the spacey, on the trilling title track, where a creeping dark chord sequence sits beneath altogether more vibrant tones, before giving way to a sloshing ebb and flow overlayed with some barbed organ, and there are moments here that remind me of Gift by The Sisterhood, Andrew Eldritch’s project between phases of The Sisters of Mercy: specifically, the notation the chilly closer ‘Rain From Heaven’. Closing off, ‘The Sting of the Lie’ is a relentless, cyclical composition over which blasts of wavering, quavering keyboards wander and spin.

Skin Of Salt brings together a range of elements, and not always comfortably. But why should music be comfortable, why should it always be easy, accessible? What’s wrong with discord and dissonance, lumpiness, discomfort? Why, nothing, is the answer. Life is brimming with discord and dissonance, lumpiness, discomfort. And without these elements, this would just be a bland hybrid of dance and ambient. Thankfully, it is so much more. Skin Of Salt isn’t mere mental chewing gum, but something which requires some proper chewing and a slow digestion.

AA