Cruel Nature Recordings – 24th November 2023
Christopher Nosnibor
Spanish electronic musician Julio Tornero has been producing minimal techno, IDM and experimental music since 2015. He’s one of those people who has a million different projects and as many different pseudonyms, also recording as Dark Tibet, Oceanic Alpha Axis, Sequences Binaires, with his work published by a multitude of labels including Fmur, Intellitronic Bubble, Detriti, Phantasma Disques.
I never cease to be amazed by artists who simply effuse and froth with creative output: how do they do it? How do they have the time, let alone the headspace? Given the economics of art in the 21st century, the likelihood of a life on the further recesses of obscurity in the most obscure of genres could provide a living seems improbable, but then to have the capacity to produce art after the slog of a day-job seems almost superhuman. And this, this is not just some easy, off-the-cuff, going-through-the-motions half-arsed toss-off.
Tierra de Silencio is pitched as ‘A homage to the formative years and evolution of electronic music’, with nods to Nurse With Wound and other progenitors of that nascent industrial sound, which was born primarily out of a spirit of experimentalism, and a desire to be different, facilitated as it was by emerging technology.
It’s perhaps hard to really assimilate now how the late 70s and early 80s witnessed a technology explosion, which not only witnessed the advent of new synths and drum machines, but saw them become available on a low-budget, mass-market basis. But while many bought them up and started making synth pop, some oddballs did what oddballs always to and decided to push the kit as hard as they could. And some of the results were utterly deranged. Tape loops and all kinds of messing yielded results with varying degrees of listenability, from Throbbing Gristle to NWW to Foetus and Cabaret Voltaire.
With only four tracks, this is one of those albums which would lend itself to an extravagant 2×12” release, with a track per side, since these are very much longform works, with ‘Duermevela’ stretching out beyond seventeen minutes, and the title track lasting more than a quarter of an hour. But if the expectation is for a set of compositions which are primitive, difficult, and in some way steeped in nostalgia for that early 80s noise, this isn’t that album. Despite the analogue feel, Tierra de Silencio finds Tornero exploring the spirit of the period, rather than striving to recreate the sound.
The first track, ‘Metamorph’ splashes in at the dancier end of the spectrum with some hard groove vibes. Fast, urgent, flickery, and glittery, it’s a shimmering curtain of electronica which ripples over a driving, dynamic beat that doesn’t let up. It’s got heavy hints of DAF, but it’s still not without a taste of Yello or Chris and Cosey. And it keeps on going for eleven and a half minutes. In time, the beat peters out and we’re left in a whirlpool of fizzing electronics.
The aforementioned ‘Duermevela,’ the album’s second track, draws on 70s electronica, with endless bubbling, rippling synths and incursions of altogether harsher sounds. Blasts of dark noise deluge over the bleak explosions of dankness. The beats are busy, and also metrononomic, and the effect is mesmerising.
Something dazzles for a moment. Then the lights flicker. What is this? This is likely panic. Negatividad Absoluta binks, bonks, bleeps and tweets, and the atmosphere is 70s sci-fi, something on the cusp of strangeness, jarring, alien, robotic. There are crunches and fizzes, crackles of distortion, and top-end tones ping back and forth like ping-pong.
Tierra de Silencio is very much an album which pushes an experimental vibe, while maxing out on what feels now like more contemporary dance tropes, largely on account of the rippling synths and glooping repetition. But it also incorporates elements of Kraftwerk and early Human League in its deployment of those vintage synth sounds and layerings. It’s an intriguing and entertaining work, and it passes hypnotically in what feels like no time at all.
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Aural Aggravation 