Posts Tagged ‘Dark-Ambient’

David Toop & Lawrence English – The Shell That Speaks The Sea

Posted: 4 June 2023 in Albums
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Room40 – 2nd June 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

I’ve been engrossed by Lawrence English’s works for some years now, and my appreciation of him and his methods were only enhanced when I conducted an interview with him about ten years ago for a now-defunct site (so many are now: the idea that once online it’s there forever has been proven false, and we’re all sitting, bewildered by as rapidly-vanishing archive of the recent past), where we touched on cut-ups and William Burroughs and I was struck by the depth of his knowledge and references.

But I have grave concerns around future history, or the future of history. While the move to digital was hailed as a move toward permanence, incorruptibility, the opposite has proved true. No-one writes anything down anymore, no-one produces additional. tape copies. If your hard-drive gets fucked, so does your entire library. The Cloud? Do you even know where it is? Does it even exist?

While we reflect on this, let us also consider this album and its slow gestation. David Toop is another artist I’ve spent some time listening to, and writing about, including his Breathing Spirit Forms three-way collaboration with Akio Suzuki and Lawrence English, but this is the first time just the pair of them have worked together, and Lawrence explains its evolution as follows: ‘Over the years, David and I have shared an interest in both the material and immaterial implications of sound (amongst other things). Moreover we’ve connected many times on matters which lies at the fringes of how we might choose to think about audition, our interests seeking in the affective realm that haunts, rather than describes, experience. The Shell That Speaks The Sea very much resonates from this shared fascination… I’m not exactly sure when we first mooted this duet, but I sense its initial trace is now more than a decade ago. I tend to live by the motto of ‘right place, right time’ and I believe David likely also subscribes to this methodology. A couple of years ago, David and I reignited the duet conversation and began exchanging materials. As a jumping off point, I explored a series of field recordings that, for me at least, captured something of this affective haunting that I mentioned previously’.

And haunting it is: ghosts of memories and fragments of half-recollections lurk and loom amidst the thick, dark shadows forged by the unsettling sounds. The title suggests an album of soft ambient washes, a gentle tidal swash, a soothing, tranquil work. It is not.

‘Abyssal Tracker’ is remarkably atmospheric in a sparse, gloomy, sense, and provides a fitting introduction to the duo’s idiosyncratic work, compiling sighs and vocal rasps over elongated strains of feedback and a suffocating atmosphere. Shrill shrieks echo out over eerie notes and a scratching insectoid clamour in the trebly range. Thuds ripple beneath the surface: there is so much texture and detail here, you find yourself looking about nervously, seeking the various sources and to see what’s over your shoulder, or hovering above your head.

Clanks and clatters and clanks and thuds are the dominant features of this album, and is lasers fire into the abyss of emptiness on the dense and disturbing ‘Reading Bones’, which scratches and scrapes, while there are earth-churning low-range disturbances – and words, but they’re indecipherable, spoken in low, whispering grunts, and it’s impossible to decipher even the language, sounding as it does like an ancient incantation.

It’s not all quite so skin-pricklingly tense, but much of it is: ‘Mouth Cave’ is dark, dank, low and rumbling, but has textures and what sounds like the trickle of running water spattering in the background amidst the cavernous gloom, and if ‘Whistling in the Dark’ sounds like a simplistic description, it’s accurate – but also suspenseful, scary and bordering on horror tropes; the whistling is deranged and floats through a heavy, crackling doomy drone. There are more ominous mutterings amidst the creeping darkness of ‘The Chair’s Story’, which feels like casting a look back through the ages through a thick fog at scenes of torture and pain and great sorrow and forward, to a laser-bleeping future.

As I seem to be prone to lately, I found myself nodding through fatigue but also, simultaneously, tense and alert during The Shell That Speaks The Sea, an album which possesses vast sonic expanses and a bleak, oppressive atmosphere. Each track offers something different, and this only accentuates the ‘otherness’ of the music this album contains; it’s like walking through a series of disturbing dreams, whereby each scene presents a new unfamiliar setting, and there are hints of BBC Radiophonic Workshop and vintage sci-fi about this incredibly imaginative work.

It may have taken a long time to piece together, but the results make the labour more than worthwhile.

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Eric Angelo Bessel – Kindly Rewind

Posted: 24 March 2023 in Singles and EPs
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23rd March 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s been a while since I’ve seen it, but the title of Eric Angelo Bessel’s new single reminded me of the Jack Black ‘buddy comedy-drama’ (as Wikipedia would have it) from 2008, which reminds us that nostalgia for VHS and film rentals hit pretty swiftly after their demise, in real terms. In fact, here in the UK, Blockbuster creaked on with DVD rentals and secondhand sales into 2013. But as an article in The Independent in January 2013 reported, ‘While the North Finchley store had a poor selection of DVDs, the big surprise was that it was charging £5 to £8 for second-hand films to buy, so I bought brand new ones at HMV instead.’ As such, it was clear that times had changed and the world had moved on long before the last rental stores closed their doors.

But the idea of rewinding – something intrinsically connected to the age of the cassette, be it audio or video – is one which is an instant cut to nostalgia, and one which reminds us that thee one thing you can’t rewind is life: there is no rewind on time, and the past is past.

‘Kindly Rewind’ is a slow-swelling deep ambient piece that isn’t about nostalgia for the 80s or 90s, but instead drills deeper, venturing back to prehistoric oceans as its backward surges evoking images of slow evolution and microcosmic growth beneath the oceans. Sedate and supple, this is delicate and spacious and slightly disorientating. It’s also measured, musically articulate, and resonates unexpectedly. It’s a work of quality.

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Fern – Deformed

Posted: 16 March 2023 in Albums
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Dret Skivor – 3rd March 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Fern’s Deformed is appropriately titled: this some mangled shit. From the slow, deliberate, rolling grooves that boom and bow through snarled up noise, while against it, crisp, crunching beats thump and stutter, Fern keeps things interesting and innovative, but more than anything, keeps it uncomfortable.

Deformed sits within that bracket of dark ambient that’s deeply dark, but not entirely ambient, and doesn’t for a second let you settle into it, instead twisting and squirming awkwardly, refusing to solidify or confirm to any one fork of style.

‘Intro’, the minute-long splurge of wibbly dissonance set the scene nicely for the following twenty-five minutes of oddball electronica. The liner notes offer ‘Respect to Portishead, aphex twin, faster katt and Mindacid for inspiration (samples)’.

The majority of the album’s ten tracks are brief sonic snippets, most being well under three minutes in duration, and in many respects, Deformed feels more like a palette sampler than a fully realised work – although that is by no means a failing, as it gives the album an immediacy that further evolution would likely dilute.

It’s four tracks in that Deformed really starts to take (strange, twisted, unexpected and indefinable) shape: ‘Greyhats’, a live recording – it’s unclear if it’s live in the studio or soundboard, but there’s no crowd noise and it fades at the end – is aggressive, dark, and difficult.

Immediately after, ‘Heaven in my hands’ is a murky mangled mess of distortion and mid-range, drums overloaded and crackling in a grey blurry sonic haze, and ‘Give Your Soul Away’ is a skull-pounding beat-driven assault, and the samples pile in thick and fast. ‘Porthole’ is dense, robotic, repetitive, and while dance elements are a defining feature of the album’s style, this is by no means a dance album: it’s stark, it’s bleak, detached, and in places, unsettling.

Deformed is many things: easy, predictable, comfortable, are not among them.

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Conflux Coldwell – Music for Installation

Posted: 13 January 2023 in Albums
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Christopher Nosnibor

Coldwell’s own notes which accompany this – truly epic – album explains and articulates it best, when he writes ‘This new retrospective is certainly not your typical album. Each track is almost an album in its own right! The material sees CC at his most experimental, stripped back, noisy and immersive. Following on from last year’s Music for Documentary Film, this collection gathers together some of Michael C Coldwell’s sound art work and music written for exhibition and gallery contexts.’

This is very much one of the benefits of the digital format: there is no restriction of duration on account of data capacity. Time was when physical formats restricted the running time of a release, with a vinyl LP optimally running for around forty-five minutes but having the capacity to squeeze in about an hour, with CDs being able to hold seventy-two minutes and while a cassette could – precariously – take two hours, no-one released a two-hour single cassette.

Conflux Coldwell’s collection of installation works is immense, and with a running time of around two-and-a-quarter hours, it’s in the realms of recent Swans albums. While it’s by no means a brag, I’ve endured longer, notably Frank Rothkamm’s twenty-four-disc, twenty-four-hour Werner Process, and am also aware of Throbbing Gristle’s legendary 24 Hours cassette box set, but the point is, Coldwell has really made the most of the space available to him here.

I sometimes differentiate albums as being foreground or background, and Music for Installation is very much background, the very definition of ambient. That isn’t to say it’s uninteresting or unengaging. It’s simply a vast set of field recordings and sound collages that make you feel as if you’re in a certain environment. Unlike the aforementioned Swans albums, which I find are difficult to listen to because they require a commitment of time to sit with them and focus, to actively listen, Music for Installation is a very different beast which works while rumbling on while you’re doing other things. And as an experience, this very much works.

The fifty-five minutes excerpt (!) of Remote Viewer is exemplary. Passing cars, scrapes, drones, the sound of metal on metal, clanking, indistinguishable muttered dialogue, and extraneous sounds that range from – possibly – the rush of wind to the sound of feet gently passing on creaking timbers, all sit side by side and overlap in various shapes to create a latticework of real-life founds the likes of which you probably would ignore if you even noticed them at all under normal circumstances. Of course, if this is an excerpt, where’s the rest? It’s the kind of immersive soundwork that could run for hours and that would be perfectly fine.

The live performance of ‘Dead Air’, which runs for an album-length headline performance is superb. It’s testing, but it’s also magnificently executed. The sounds and textures are balanced, but the overall sound is gloopy. The result is a piece that’s creepy, evocative, and dissonant, and built around wailing whistles and pulsating drones that coalesce intro their own organic rhythms, drawing together elements of Kraftwerk and Throbbing Gristle to conjure a dark, dingy soundscape.

‘Dismantle the Sun’, running for fourteen minutes feels concise in comparison. It’s barely there for the most part, the most ambient of field recordings. It’s hard to identify any of the individual sources, but again, there are rhythms that emerge from the rumble off passing cars and the whisper of the wind, and the piece transitions both sonically and spatially as it progresses, at times evolving from a whisper to a howl. One feels a sense of movement, which in turn creates a sense of disorientation, although the voiceover detailing ‘solar oscillations’ in the closing minutes provides a certain grounding.

The final brace of compositions, ‘Alternating Current’ and ‘The Specious Present (How Long is Now?), which have a combined time of around ten minutes feel like barely snippets or sketches in comparison to the other three immense pieces, but what they lack in duration, they compensate in depth, being richly textured and showcasing some interesting beats and conjuring some dark, confined spaces. And for all its vastness, Music for Installation is quite a dense, claustrophobic experience at times – and it’s a quite remarkable experience, too.

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Houses of Worship – Migration OST

Posted: 13 December 2022 in Albums
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Midira Records – 25th November 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

This album is, as the title suggests, a soundtrack work. Although released under the moniker Houses of Worship, it’s essentially the second album by Thisquietarmy x Hellenica.

The summer of 2020 saw Eric Quach (thisquietarmy) and Jim Demos (Hellenica) come together to record a collaborative album, which emerged as Houses of Worship, described as ‘an epic work of experimental industrial ambient, is an ode to dying buildings and the unwelcome gentrification of neighborhoods’.

This, the follow-up, came about after they ‘played their first concerts in the streets of Montreal from inside of a cube truck. These performances were filmed and recorded to produce "TQAXHLNKA: MIGRATION,” a twenty-two-minute experimental art documentary and an accompanying soundtrack. The film simulated the cautionary tale of what the Montreal arts and music scene could look like in a post-pandemic world. As the title suggests, it reflects the highly concerning exodus of artists constantly being divided and pushed out further from their community.’

At twenty-two minutes in duration, it’s a minute short of the magic spot, but this is a magnificently atmospheric work that goes beyond dark ambience and ventures into the vastly cinematic, space-drifting expansiveness that transports the listener beyond the terrestrial domain.

The album contains more audio than the film’s running time, and drags the listener through a bleak journey which articulates via the medium of sound the themes and scenes which preoccupy the duo, who explain, ‘With the current struggles linked to the pandemic restrictions, we have seen the acceleration of the gentrification process in neighborhoods where the heart of these activities takes place. As a result, a multitude of venues, studios and artistic spaces – places used for exchanging ideas with our peers and building communities meant to inspire and nurture our souls had to shut down.’

The tone is dark, the textures industrial, yet tinged with echo-heavy melancholy, a combination of anger, emptiness, and sadness. The soaring drones inspire a certain elevation, while the gritty grind is the sound of construction, regeneration. Gentrification is the face of capitalism eating itself; having run out of new ideas, it’s simply fallen into a cycle of recreation and rehashing. Upscaling, upwhatevering, it’s all about selling the new version of the same od shit at a higher price to the same saturated market. When will enough ever be enough?

Meanwhile, capitalism follows the former tropes of the avant-garde, destroying to rebuild, and Migration is the soundtrack to that.

There are lots of drones, lots of dolorous tones, lots of scraping, sinewy mid-range and gravel-grabbing, churning lower spectrum sounds, as well a haunting piano and infinite empty space. The titles paint the picture in themselves, and it’s dark, smoggy, sulphurous. ‘Total Waste Management’; ‘Polytethylene Terephthalate’; ‘Oil Terminal Tank Farm’ are all evocative of stark industrial scenes.

‘Industrial Estate Bird’s-Eye’ is a haunting wail, presumably of a theremin – over a low, throbbing drone that’s reminiscent of Suicide, and elsewhere, the duo conjure thick, billowing clouds of doom that sound like Sunn O))) behind a power station, as dense rumbles ripple forth. The twelve-and-a-half-minute finale, ‘Throbbing Magnetics’ fulfils the promise of its title, a bucking beast of claustrophobic, crushing gloom, and you feel yourself dragged into the sludge of that relentless, interminable cycle of collapse and construct.

It’s an accomplished work, but a depressing one, and listening places to the fore the abject nature of late capitalism, and the fact that any attempt to save the planet is futile in the face of the onslaught of bulldozers. Redevelopment has nothing to do with environment, only profit, and hard as you might rebel, as strongly as you may protest, you’re powerless against the big money. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s the sad truth. Houses of Worship recognise this. They may hope for better, but Migration is not a protest record, but the sound of grim acceptance.

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Lisa Hammer – Dakini

Posted: 28 October 2022 in Albums
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The Circle Music – 9th September 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

Dakini, the debut album by Lisa Hammer (Requiem In White, Mors Syphilitica) was originally released back in 2009. It’s been described as ‘music for ritual, introspection and awakening of the senses’, ‘a complete manifesto of inner search in which a lot of influences from different genres of music’, and that it was ‘designed to carry the listener away from the manifest world and into a deeper space’.

Re-released here on limited coloured vinyl as an expanded release with three additional tracks, it provides an ideal opportunity for existing fans to re-evaluate, and reacquaint themselves, and for latecomers to be introduced.

It happens that I’m in the latter camp, and so am coming to the album with fresh ears, and only the facts that it’s pitched as being for fans of Dead Can Dance while promising ‘unprecedented vocals, sometimes angelic and sometimes damned as if they come from another period forgotten by the time.

Now, one might ask, if the original release was a ‘complete manifesto’, is the inclusion of additional tracks not gilding the lily? Especially when considering that ‘the Indian ragas correspond with times of the day, so the album represents a condensed 24 hours, which is perfect for ritual, or any emotional and spiritual trip.’ In context, there is the question off how to assimilate the additional material in the least obtrusive way, with the least impact on the flow that is so integral to the original concept?

Opening the album with a new, seven-minute ‘Alte Clamat Epicurus’ works nicely; it’s an evocative vocal incantation with a sparse droning backing. It sounds – in the mind’s eye, and with a small soupçon of imagination – like a sunrise, like an awakening. Hammer sounds both otherworldly and most incredibly earthy, which is no small feat – but then, I find that this is something particular to music, particularly vocalisations, which tap into echoes of ancient spirituality. While exalting the heavens, there feels as though there is a deeper connection with the ground, the rocks, trees, the elements. It paves the way perfectly for ‘In Taberna Quando Sumus’; simple, rhythmic, repetitive. As the album progresses, one becomes attuned to the sense of an arc, of a cycle, and Hammer leads the listener on a journey inside. Some of the musical arrangements are so minimal as to be barely there, the sound of the wind and cavernous reverberations, while others are centred around hypnotic percussion and wordless choral vocalisations, as on the powerful ‘Samsara’ and the lilting, ethereal ‘Vajra’.

That flow is disrupted somewhat with a dance mix of ‘Chant Nr 5’ dropped as the fourteenth track at the end of side three. In the sense that it bookends the side, which opens with the original version, it makes some sort of sense, but still… it’s incongruous, sweeping away the drifting incense with a busy beat and quavering organ tone. Perhaps this is why I’m always hesitant to use the term ‘world’ music: it’s such a western-centric view of the globe, where ‘the world’ is vast and the west occupies only a sliver of it, both geographically and culturally. In the west, the west is the world and perceives its cultural dominance as such. It’s a badly skewed perspective.

While Dakini incorporates elements of what would commonly be described as ‘world’ music, it’s really ‘world’ music in that it truly embraces music from the world in its full breadth, with the delicate sing-song of ‘Lullaby’ perhaps owing more to western traditions and showing that for Hammer, all sources are equal, and it makes for a rich and moving listening experience.

Side four ends, and closes the album, with the third and final bonus track, ‘Hurdy Gurdy Gavotte’. And there, it sits perfectly.

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Stezler / Murray – Commit

Posted: 7 May 2022 in Albums
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The Helen Scarsdale Agency – HMS064 – 6th May 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

As William Burroughs said of his collaboration with Brion Gysin, The Third Mind, ‘No two minds ever come together without, thereby, creating a third, invisible force which may be likened to a third mind’. This wasn’t an entirely original concept, as he was referencing Napoleon Hill’s self-help book Think and Grow Rich, published in the 1930s. Self-help books are notorious for dispensing band advice and convincing the incapable that they’re capable of anything, but there’s a powerful shred of truth in this nugget: collaboration can – although there are absolutely no guarantees – throw open portal and new horizons and unlock unexpected avenues and whole worlds of potential. That more or less all of my attempts at collaboration have swiftly ended in failure – or, more accurately, fallen apart without producing anything more than a few paragraphs at best – probably says more about me than collaboration or my collaborators, but then when things have worked out… Yes, they’ve delivered. When it happens, it really happens. You can’t force or predict ‘gelling’: it simply happens, or it doesn’t, and when it does, alchemy ensues. You tend to find that strengths and weaknesses interlock, and all bases are covered, to use a poor assemblage of cliches.

The accompanying text for the third production from the Stelzer/Murray project says that it ‘hits a sweet spot of slippery, industrial occultation that harkens back to an almost forgotten period of music from the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. Think Cranioclast, Arcane Device, Phauss, Small Cruel Party, Organum, and pretty much everything from the Quiet Artworks label… Exquisitely composed and overtly nocturnal without ever falling into the tropes of dark ambient and with plenty of gestures, signals, and threats that allude to any number of allegorically inclined processes (i.e. tape manipulation, time-delay accumulation, electro-acoustic minimalism, etc.).’

No question, despite their apparent absence of recollection of the actual process, Stelzer and Murray are the perfect foils for one another. Alchemy clearly has ensued – but make no mistake, this is some seriously dark alchemy, conjuring thick, black clouds of lung-clogging smoke that drifts, chokes, and suffocates.

On Commit, the atmosphere is dark, dank, doomy. The album is structured over two sides with the two parts of the title track, clocking in at around nine minutes apiece occupying side one before the nineteen-minute gloomfest that is ‘The House is Coming from Inside the Call’ smogging blurrily all over side two. The two parts of ‘Commit’ are darkly intense. They rumble and drone, groan and grind. There ae slow swells of cymbal, and a distant clicking, glitching that pulses time on ‘Commit 2’

is ‘The House is Coming from Inside the Call’ is sparse yet intense, and manifests as a series of movements over its duration. The atmosphere is heavy and oppressive, and the noise builds – and it is indeed noise that builds: it starts off as light drone and evolves into a thundering blast of grinding noise, clattering clanks of machinery and a howling siren that warns of danger, of imminent doom. You want to run for cover, to tale refuge, but there’s no escape and no shelter: thirteen minutes in and it’s built to a gut-churning, punishing churn of industrial noise, with clattering spanners and metal grating against metal.

In the dingy realms of dark ambient, Commit is a strong piece of work. It is dark, and dense, and intense. It possesses an unforgiving density, and it only gets darker and denser as it progresses. It’s an immersive and well-realised work, but Christ, is it bleak.

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brb>voicecoil – Dissolve into the Now

Posted: 2 April 2022 in Albums
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Muzamuza – 8th April 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

Eighteen months on from Alms of Guilt and the prodigious Newcastle sound artist Kevin Wilkinson, aka brb>voicecoil returns with Dissolve into the Now. Active for over a quarter of a century, his field remains staunchly experimental and underground.

Forged from founds sounds subsequently manipulated and mauled beyond recognition, the majority of the seven compositions on Dissolve into the Now are briefer than on its predecessor, with more than half compressed into under five minutes. But what that compression of time also translates to is a compression of density. Wilkinson describes the album as the ‘audio equivalent of a bag of cats’. If only it had even one cuddly feature. Dissolve into the Now is pretty bloody difficult for the most part.

Understanding the title of the first piece, ‘The Great Antagnoiser’ as a play on ‘The Great Annihilator’ (not only a Swans album, but, perhaps more significantly, the name of a microquasar surrounding a black hole in the Milky Way), it seems appropriate for this springing, glitching, fragmentary spray of sound collapsing into atomic particles. It’s like an entire library of samples splintering as they’re dragged along a conveyor belt before being sucked to their doom. It paves the way for increasingly murky, and increasingly fractured, pieces constructed from later upon later of darkness and dissonance.

‘Assimilate 5.1’ is bleak, ominous, dark; sounds that evoke flames and the screams of animals as they flee a forest fire are half-audible amidst a mid-range thrum. Shifting, scratching, rumbling… there’s much by way of atmosphere, and none of it’s pleasant of comfortable, but at the same time, there’s nothing tangible to take hold of through this ever-shifting work. Frequencies sweep in and out, bubble and burst, fizz and fade in the blink of an eye, everything fermenting in a soup of miscellanea. It’s like a neurological explosion. Time and tapes run backwards at his speed in the erasural ‘The Fact it was Removed Doesn’t Mean it Never Existed’. By this point, everything’s really starting to fuck with your head, and that’s before the dubby-bass barrage of ‘Nod to the Mu’, which might be a dance track if it wasn’t subject to being mixed by a strimmer and mastered by a wood chipper and spat out as dust and pulp.

The first of the album’s two longer tracks (running over eight minutes), ‘Sycophant They Are – Watch Them’ is a frothing, foaming, fizzing mess of flickering circuitry spasms which shares common ground with Gintas K’s work. The second of the longer pieces is the closer, ‘Assimilate 5.2’, and it’s here everything is incinerated under the roar of a jet engine, leaving nothing but scorched earth. Obliterated, dissolved, we’re left with nothing but air and the roar of silence.

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Lustmord & Zola Jesus – Prime

Posted: 20 March 2022 in Singles and EPs
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Pelagic Records – 15th March 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

Is there anyone Lustmord hasn’t collaborated with, or otherwise touched (metaphorically) in some way?

Lustmord, aka Welsh-born Brian Williams embarked on his musical career back in 1980: that’s a forty-two year span now, and the range of artists he’s collaborated with while forging a staggering output of solo releases is beyond staggering. Having emerged from the early industrial milieu and the circlers of Throbbing Gristle, Coil, and SPK, of which he was a member for a time, Lustmord is generally hailed as the progenitor of the dark ambient genre.

A tribute / covers album feels appropriate, then, and the selection of contributors to The Others – Lustmord Deconstructed includes Ulver, Enslaved, Godflesh, Zola Jesus, Katatonia’s Jonas Renske, Jo Quail, The Ocean, MONO and more.

It’s noteworthy that the tracks are credited to ‘Lustmord &…’ as if in collaboration – but then again, isn’t any cover a collaboration of kinds, albeit distant and disconnected? A meeting of minds across time and space.

And so, ahead of the release of The Others – Lustmord Deconstructed, Zola Jesus has shared her cover of ‘Prime’, from the 2020 album Stockholm, recorded live in 2011 and released in 2014. She comments, “As a longtime fan of Lustmord’s work, the opportunity to combine landscapes was like a dream. I’m so inspired by the space and stillness within his music. I wanted to experiment with his way of keeping music on a slow boil, mostly to challenge my own propensity for maximalism.”

It’s certainly a departure from ZJ’s usual style of epic, string-soaked theatrical dramatics, but at the same time, it has all of the rich atmosphere you’d expect. Her gothic, operatic vocal is very much kept in check here, echoing ethereally around a dark rumbling growl of abstraction is melded to a heartbeat. It’s tense, and channels a dark energy that’s almost spiritual. It’s the haunting, otherworldly sound of decay, of tremors from the depths of an ancient sepulchre. It’s mystical, magical, and magnificent.

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Pless – Hypernormal

Posted: 7 January 2022 in Albums
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Everest Records – 14th January 2021

Christopher Nosnibor

Language is fluid, it evolves. Sometimes I appreciate that, and like the fact. Other times, this is something which can be intensely frustrating, and it seems the meaning of hypernormal has evolved – seems to have been reconfigured, rechannelled – with remarkable rapidity. Initially, it was something of a colloquialism, an on-trend sassy term to describe something that was so normal it was beyond bland.

The connotations of the scarily mundane, the individual who was so lacking individuality that they made clones appear unique, which emerged late in the first decade of the new millennium remained largely stable until Adam Curtis delivered his seismic three-hour documentary in 2016, which espoused the theory that HyperNormalisation is a process whereby a mundane, readily-digested version of life and society has been superimposed over the complex world by those in power. And so according to this, we now live in a ‘fake’ world. And this concept of a constructed reality overlaying the true reality seems unsettlingly feasible. What, and who can you trust or believe? Trust no-one; believe nothing.

Perhaps because I think too much and don’t sleep enough, I’ve wondered ever since I was a child if the world we live in is real, or if we’re all figments of our own imagination, and if reality is a construct. Yes, I experienced existentialism combined with some kind of take on The Matrix at the age of five. But I digress, and there is a point to all of this, and that is that nothing is fixed, nothing is certain. We know so little, we don’t even know ourselves.

Pless’ hybrid sound is absolutely not normal, and it’s certainly not normal beyond normal so as to be the next level of mundane; but nor does it feel entirely like a carefully-constructed fiction which bears the ultimate lie. That said, there is a certain element of deception here: the façade of simplicity, of minimal, semi-ambient electronica belies the detail and complexity of these layered compositions, and as such, it’s something not normal, disguised as something that resembles normal, or at least familiar. Ultimately, it’s something else entirely; something mellow, something layered, something dark and something light. All of this filters into cognisance in the first piece, the slow-paced, semi-abstract ‘Azure’, whereby spectral synths drift around a metronomic drum and ever-moving bass tones.

The drum sound is noteworthy: it’s somehow immediate, up-front, and dry, as well as reverby, landing between Joy Division and Duran Duran.

The synths of ‘La Cienaga’ lean towards A Flock of Seagulls, but the stuttering drums and stammering incidentals contribute to transporting this track to another place entirely, one filled with dark shadows cast by brooding electropop and darkwave. Meanwhile, the six-minute ‘La Grenouille Volante’ has a bass that thrums like an engine throbbing at the dark heart of its soft ambient washes and distant drums. Around two-thirds in, it unexpectedly revs up a gear, and while the same, the additional volume translates to additional intensity, too.

The haunting, spectral organ drone of ‘Ante finem’ is blasted through with hefty tribal percussion, gradually shifting to a slow, deliberate bass-driven trudge, while ‘Fog City’ is every bit as murky and disorientating as you would likely imagine, with vocal samples and reverberated snare cracks echoing through stark synth stabs, and ‘Hot God’ comes on like a collision between Kraftwerk and DAF with a dash of early New Order, mining a deep seam of late 70s/early 80s electronica. The final track, the ten-minute ‘Reodorant’ is a dark-ambient epic in every sense, deep, moody, a little unnerving.

Each of the pieces shifts as it progresses, and evolves over the course of its duration, often subtly, twisting through expansive soundscapes front one plateau to another. Under the cloak of minimalism is shrouded considerable detail, and a quite remarkable focus on texture and movement. Even in the most stagnant of moments, there isn’t an element of stillness here. It may be cold, it may be distanced, but it’s also quite its own work. Normal? What even is that anyway? Stark, sparse, yet so, so rich, with Hypernormal, it becomes clear that Pless is more.

AA

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