The title of the latest album by the super-prolific experimental composer and student of film and musique concrete, Emmanuel Mieville, comes from the Japanese translation of the Sanskrit word and alludes to a chapter of the Lotus Sutra, a renowned text from Māhāyana Buddhism. Apparently. It’s hardly my field of expertise. And so the inevitable question arises: what’s my point of entry?
Juryo is by no means an accessible album and its four longform tracks, which span between nine and eighteen minutes don’t readily lend themselves to lengthy debates about Buddhism and the path to enlightenment. Similarly, that the album consists of four compositions shows no obvious correlation with the twenty-eight chapters of the Lotus Sutra. As such, it’s fair to surmise that the allusion which connects the title to the contents is in largely an oblique one, beyond the fact that the album features field recordings captured in Asia.
This is swampy, abstract, murky noise. On the surface, it’s a formless conglomeration of noise, grating, grinding scrapes and bumps. Woozy rippling bubbles flit and floom over tidal waves of surging extranea, which may or may not be the swash of actual water rippling over rocks: it could equally be an aural illusion, or an intentional simulacrum.
Top-end whistles sustain for an eternity and aggravate not only the aural receptors but the mind on ‘Nyorai’, although in the mix are recordings of Tibetan nuns and FM radio from Hong Kong. These manifests as chants and clattering chimes and finger cymbals which emerge around the midpoint of the seventeen-minute sonic journey. According to the liner notes, ‘Murasaki’ means ‘purple’ in Japanese, but the spinning, swirling sonic discombobulations which eddy and swirl present a kaleidoscopic vista.
In the sleeve notes, Mieville explains that ‘Taisi Funeral’ (the fourth and final track) is a ‘recording of Buddhist chanting for a deceased person recorded in a small village in Taiwan, mingled with my own synthetic sounds. Tanit Astarté is a quotation from Antonin Artaud’s book Héliogabale and refers to the moon goddess, as described in Phoenician myths’. It’s certainly the most overtly musical and rhythmic of the four compositions, but as a rising surge of amorphous sound rises to wash away the voices and the rhythm peters out, it transforms to an altogether more ambient soundscape. Morever, while still linking back to the overarching theme of the Lotus Sutra, we can see that Meiville’s sphere of reference is considerably broader than may first appear.
Juryo is subtly complex and had both range and depth. It doesn’t readily conform to any one genre, but to lazily slot it into the broad space occupied by ‘experimental / avant-garde’ is to fail to recognise the spectrum of stylistic elements it incorporates.
Having followed Mark Kluzek’s Doomed Bird of Providence for some time now, I was keen to hear the latest instalment. Over the last six years, he and his collaborators have produced a series of concept albums centred around Australian history, all using the medium of dark folk with heavy echoes of Nick Cave. Burrowed into the Soft Sky is very much an album devised as being suited to a vinyl release, and is perhaps the most challenging Doomed Bird release yet, consisting as it does of just two tracks each with a duration of some twenty minutes. While still pursuing what the bio refers to as ‘Kluzek’s obsessive and singular foray into early colonial history’, Burrowed into the Soft Sky discards the vocal element, meaning the narrative, such as it is, is purely musical.
To understand the objective and the context of the album and the individual tracks, it’s beneficial to quote liberally from the accompanying press release.
‘The underlying themes for each track are contrasting yet tie together via their historical context; a period where indigenous Australian belief systems and day-to-day lives were irrevocably assaulted. The song Burrowed into the Soft Sky is based on a passage from Patrick White’s novel Voss. The book is very loosely based on the final (and fatal) journey through the northern regions of Australia by German explorer Ludwig Leichardt. Kluzek took a passage from the book where a comet passes over and Voss, his team and a tribe of Australian Aboriginals engage with and interpret the experience until it is ‘burrowed into the soft sky’.’
How this manifests is in a piece which exits as a sequence of gradually-shifting transitions, sparse and haunting woodwind drifting across an urgent acoustic thrum, while percussion builds, and then draws back again. Around the mid-point it bursts into a sustained crescendo, with sweeping strings cascading over an insistent, energetic beat, but for the most part, it’s less about overt drama and more about the brooding. The closing segment is a dolorous fanfare, with nostalgia-evoking horns sounding out over a slow march that finally tapers to a twinkling glockenspiel that does evoke something approximating a soft sky.
The press release provides the following explication for the track which occupies side B: ‘The Blood Dimmed Tide is Loosed takes a significantly darker turn shining a light on a pattern of atrocity that took place in the north east of Australia at a time where a dynamic of back and forth, invariably initiated by colonists, took place and culminating in a “dispersal” of a tribe, “by shooting them down – men, women and children, the object being to destroy as many as possible.” This is based on accounts of such events in the book Exclusion, exploitation and extermination: race relations in colonial Queensland (Raymond Evans, Kay Saunders, Kathryn Cronin). Attacks of this nature on tribes were commonplace.’
As indicated, the track immediately plunged into darker territory, uncomfortable, tense tones forging a claustrophobic atmosphere. Strings scrape like nails down a blackboard over ominous fear chords before a militaristic imperial march emerges from a tempest of percussion and screeding feedback. This in turn coalesces into a repetitious throb, imposing and intense, which bludgeons the listener’s senses as cymbals crash violently, and by the mid-point it’s collapsed into a wash of hums and drones, interrupted by clattering flickers and subterranean moans and skitters. The closing section again builds an oppressive mood, the thudding percussion partially submerged by a swell of ever-thickening noise.
A priori knowledge of the context is by no means essential to the appreciation of Burrowed into the Soft Sky. It does of course benefit the listener to have a sense of placement, but given that the correspondence between the tracks and their inspiration / meaning is far from obvious in any case, it’s an album which can readily be heard – if not necessarily ‘enjoyed’ – on its own merits. As a work which wanders through a number of instrumental musical territories, Burrowed into the Soft Sky is interesting and rewarding.
Cleopatra Records / Practical Records – 23rd June 2017
Interdisciplinary artist Rachel Mason has spent the best part of the last two decades carving out her own niche from within the hotbed of the NYC and LA scenes, with music being only one of the many strands of her creative explorations. In between making films, sculptures, and creating performance art pieces which range from the playful to the weird, she’s released quite a lot of albums. Her latest, Das Ram, is billed as ‘a full-blown modern pop-rock album of catchy songs with flamboyant flavor, dramatic vocals in between Siouxsie Sioux and SIA, captivating melodies and poignant lyrics’.
It’s not easy to focus on the lyrics, poignant or otherwise, when there’s so much going on. Das Ram is an album that’s very much geared toward delivering songs with groove and big energy. ‘Rosie’ kicks off with a delicate shoegazey pop verse that blossoms into a glorious chorus propelled by a super-frenetic drum machine with hectic hi-hats and a glistening, glittering energy shimmers.
Das Ram is an eclectic set, and wildly varied. The dramatic orchestral strikes which jut and jar through ‘Heart Explodes’ provide a dramatic landscape for Mason to prowl through en route to a soaring chorus which indicates what Florence and the Machine could sound like if Flo Welch and her crew had any grasp on subtlety.
Single cut ‘Tigers in the Dark’ is a flamboyant gothic-hued disco cut that pulls together the danger of Siouxsie with the brooding electropop sensibilities of Ladytron or Goldfrapp. ‘Marry Me’ goes all Disintegration-era Cure in the mid-section, but Mason’s vaguely shrill and increasingly desperate-sounding imploring to form marital unity (part Kate Bush, part PJ Harvey) is actually quite scary. You’d probably agree just to avert the danger of being strangled in your sleep, although it would only be a temporary postponement).
‘Cancer’ is a wild, woozy ride, a blizzard of wibbling electronica and car horns and stammering programmed drum ‘n’ bass percussion providing the sonic terrain for lyrics that veer from the abrasive to the abstract. ‘The end stage is on!’ she squeals as a refrain before a gritty, funk-infused bass cuts in half way through.
Das Ram is good. Really good. It’s a pop album, and one which will evoke myriad comparisons. And it’ll touch them all favourably, because Rachel Mason assimilates her influences in a way which isn’t merely derivative, but innovative, and Das Ram is an album which wanders through infinite shades of weird, and bristles with tension and myriad shades of darkness.
Matt Cargill’s project still has one of the best names around: it’s not only an example of punning genius, but also one of those band names which sets expectations as to what you’re going to get musically. I say musically, but that’s very much a matter of perspective. SATFD don’t make music in the conventional sense, and Molar Wrench is as sonically challenging as any of the previous releases SATFD have put out. On this outing, they’re joined by Dutch/British free jazz unit Dead Neanderthals, to form what they describe as ‘the ultimate tag team of the murky European underground’.
Given that the two acts featured on a split release last year, this collaboration seems like a logical progression. It certainly marks a departure for Sly, in that the trademark subterranean grind of endless, dark drones and unsettling atmospherics is matched with and at times consumed by the maddest jazz shit going.
The album contains just four tracks, but packs in a hell of a lot of racket. It all kicks off with a frenetic, a wild, free jazz cacophony, a melange of clamorous, ultra-hyped parping horns, sonorous lowed drone and is dominated by truly frenzied, cacophonous bent. Circuits fizz and hum while the percussion thrashes and crashes arrhythmically, throwing the listener around with reckless abandon a rollercoaster of tempestuous sonic mania.
There are two ‘Muck Man’ tracks and the first is ten minutes of slow, throbbing churn made up primarily of low and mid-range sludge, the drums holding a ragged but hard rhythm amidst a maelstrom of thick, dirty, pulsating noise. It’s almost a riff, but more a succession of waves in a rhythmically surging sonic tide, a with the density of liquid mud. Immersive would be one word.
‘Muck Man Part 2’ is altogether more low-key, a dark, atmospheric piece that manifests as a prehistoric sulphur swamp in sonic form. Slowly, the murky drift builds to a screaming tempest of noise; the brass develops from a low drone to a shrill shriek of pain and the drumming transitions from a sedate trudge to an explosive riot of noise, abrasive blasts of snarling electronica and whatever the fuck else bursting in waves of sonic shock.
The title track closes off the album, and it’s an eleven-minute trudge that calls to mind the claustrophobic brutality of Swans’ ‘Young God’ EP. The plodding percussion provides a doomy and tense prickling spine to the oppressive grind that lumbers on for what feels like a skull-crushing eternity.
There is a definite structure to Molar Wrench, in that it starts off wild and winds down to a grinding crawl, but it by no means feels like the energy displayed at the outset dissipates as the album progresses. It’s more a case that having exhausted the listener with frenetic kinetics and gone all-out on the attack at the front end, the album seeks to bludgeon the listener into submission in the later stages. And highly effective it is, too.
Perhaps I need a break. I love music and I love reviewing it. But looking through my to-review pile and my groaning inbox, I feel overwhelmed and despondent, disinterested even. I look at the tiles and the artists, knowing instinctively that some will leave me cold and others will irritate me. Perhaps stirring my frustration with break the ennui, but it’s almost 11p, and
I pick up Nonmenabsorbium on a whim. The dark cover, not so much black and white as many shades of grey, from mostly within the darker end of the greys spectrum, tells me nothing. I can’t locate the accompanying press release. I’m flying blind, with only my senses and my instinct to guide me.
It’s pleasing to discover that Nonmenabsorbium contains no music in the conventional sense. No songs, no singing. No chords, no melodies, no tunes. No identifiable shapes or structures, no instruments or rhythms. Sparse, minimal drones and high-end tweets trill and hover. Thuds and thumps, sounds recorded seemingly too close to the microphone and booming through disproportionately loud against the barely-there backdrop jolt the senses. These are sounds without context and without overt structure or direct relation to one another. Often, the incidentals are disproportionate in volume to the ever-shifting grain of the backdrop, booming and crackling mic and speaker distortion as single notes ring out and resonate.
During ‘Abholicater’, the churning clatter coalesces to create a sort of arrhythmic percussive form, hammering and beating amidst a swirling swell of amorphous grey sound, which gradually dissipates to be replaced by the fizz and pop of electrostatic, shrieking diodes and the grumbling grind of low-end hum. #
‘2nd nalicii – 197degree5’ sounds very like R2D2 building for a breakdown, an electronic work based around rising frequencies which threaten to burst the tension. But it doesn’t happen. Sonar pulses radiate amidst the crackling clatter and wowing incidental of the eleven-minute closer ‘Horrorrydclowses’, as a rain of static pink noise showers down on electronic Catherine wheels. Monitor bleeps blast into cerebral flatlines amidst a relentless whupping churn and grind of static noise which owes a clear debt to the lineage which brought us early 80s Whitehouse, Prurient, Merzbow et al. Meirin and Garcia may belong to a different musical heritage, but Nonmenabsorbium is an intense sonic assault that requires a cautious approach.
The atmosphere is one of building expectation, and tension builds with the growing sense that there must be a point at which the threat of all-out noise is realised. But such cathartic release fails to materialise. Instead, the bumps and clanks are nerve-fraying after a time, and it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish from the sounds on the disc the possibility of someone ascending the stairs, moving in the next room, stumbling around between plant pots and dustbins in the back lane or the yard outside. Consequently, the pleasure to be derived from listening to Nonmenabsorbium is perhaps a rather perverse one. Nonmenabsorbium provides an unsettling distraction, a removal from the humdrum and the sonic wallpaper of the everyday / mainstream. But, by way of escape, and also as an example of difficult but rewarding listening, Nonmenabsorbium offers an immersive and awkward sense of entertainment.
I recall that in my teens, having read the word ‘ephemeral’ just once, I used it in conversation and mispronounced it, much to the amusement of one of my fellow students. My phonetic pronunciation is replicated in the title of Miguel Angel Tolosa’s album. There’s little relevance to this anecdote in the wider picture, but that’s actually the point. It was a brief moment in time, long past and irrelevant and inconsequential on every level but for the fact that it lives on as a moment of embarrassment in my memory. And herein lies the relevance. Moments only exist in the moment: any record or document of the moment may change the context, the complexion and the enduring recollection of the moment, but in the context of the ongoing continuum of time, once the moment has passed, it’s past.
There’s surely something of a contradiction in a recorded work centred around the concept of ephemerality. The very act of committing the sound to a recorded medium captures it in time, imparts a date stamp (literal or otherwise) and locks the moment for perhaps an eternity. Ephimeral exists within these contradictions. It doesn’t exactly explore them, but the compositions – individually and collectively – serve to create a fleeting atmosphere centred around transitions and contrasts.
While the majority of the album’s compositions are preoccupied with ambience – wide, sweeping sounds, building ever-shifting cloud formations in sonic form, with the threat of a storm always looming but never becoming an actuality – there are other pieces which break the mould of fleeting, fractal aural nebulousness to coalesce into something denser, if not necessarily more tangible or readily compressed into structured musicality.
The album starts dark, ‘Rio de Cristal’ dominated by an undulating low-end drone, which segues into ‘Tropismos’, on which a dark, murky swamp of sound is rent with barrages of grinding noise and attacks of snapping shrapnel akin to machine gun fire. It’s the kind of aural experience that makes the skin crawl and the nerves jangle.
Light and dark are juxtaposed throughout, often simultaneously, with menacing chords and notes which scrape like metal against fillings filtering beneath soft, expansive clouds of sound. And perhaps it’s in the experience and the sensations this music provokes within the listener that the ephemerality of Tolosa’s work is truly apparent. The listener is left chasing fragmentary thoughts and feelings, often conflicting, arising in response to the simultaneous aspects of the music.
So how does Ephimeral leave you feeling? By turns elated but tense, strained but calm, and ultimately confused and conflicted and adrift, at odds with oneself.
From Chester-based instrumental-electronic artist, Dom Sith, comes this dark goth-inspired tune to soundtrack people’s struggles with themselves.
It’s nothing to do with Allen Ginsberg. Of the inspiration for ‘Howl’, which takes sonic leads from the likes of NIN, The Haxan Cloak, and Burial, Dom comments: “I wanted to create something haunting, something that’d soundtrack those long nights alone, but not in a reassuring way, like how loneliness might sound, and how depression might sound, if it was heard…in the dark.”
We like NIN, The Haxan Cloak, and Burial, and we like this: get your lugs round it here:
This being a Post War Glamour Girls album, there’s a lot to chew on, and I’ve played Swan Songs on the bus to and from work most days for the last month and a half in an attempt to really let the songs embed and to unravel. It’s not because Post War Glamour Girls make albums which are difficult or lack immediacy, but because there’s just so much to extract, and each listening reveals more. I’m still discovering new details and dimensions in their 2014 debut, Pink Fur, and suddenly, here we are at album number three.
And with album number three, they’ve made it a clean sweep of awesomeness: not a case of third time lucky, but a straight hat-trick. Few bands can claim such a record, although Post War Glamour Girls are unlikely to gloat, or even reflect on this achievement: chances are by the time the album tour is under way, they’ll have filled the set with new material which may or may not feature on album number four.
Swan Songs is by far their most commercial and accessible album to date, but it would be a chronic error align that in any way to them selling out, and in many ways, it’s equally their knottiest, thorniest release thus far. Yes, they’re contradictory and contrary, and that’s precisely their appeal. And while they always sound uniquely like Post War Glamour Girls – there really isn’t a band going – or, indeed, previous – who sound quite like them, they’re spectacularly varied in their style, and you never know what to expect from album to album. This is music born from restless energy and a drive to create something new, to challenge the band and their fans in equal measure. The one thing that is seemingly guaranteed is the quality of the material.
Swan Songs is most certainly their most eclectic-sounding album yet. The overall tone of the album is altogether less down than its predecessor, Feeling Strange. The downcast, brow-beaten self-loathing is replaced by a roaring defiance, at least in part. And, of course, it has all the band’s trademark qualities, honed to a new level of sharpness.
The album’s opener, ‘Guiding Light’ comes on like a cross between Big Country and The Wedding Present circa ’92 with its spiralling celtic guitar motif and stadium-fulling chorus – before making a 90-degree swerve only Post War Glamour Girls could pull off, with James Smith veering off into one of his densely-packed rants. You only catch snippets of the lyrics, but in the space of a minute he’s here, there and everywhere, pulling in what appears to be a reference to Gang of Four and macroeconomics with a line about ‘guns before butter’.
‘Chipper’ is more common PWGG terrain, and finds Smith in brawlingly nihilistic form, howling, bleating and hollering over a murky backing of guitars that jangle and warp and bend as the driving rhythm section powers on relentlessly. At the middle eight, it heads off on another trajectory, Smith coming on like a brutalised hybrid of Mark E Smith and JG Thirlwell on top of Alice Scott’s icily calm backing vocals. If ever a band knew how to work contrasts, it’s Post War Glamour Girls.
Conjuring a brilliantly visual image while working a dubby post-punk seam, the more understated ‘Gull Rips a Worm’ marks something of a departure, with Smith revealing a more soulful side in his melodic vocal delivery. Meanwhile, ‘Big Trip’, which recently found its way onto Radio 1 thanks to a shout-out from fellow Leeds legends Pulled Apart by Horses, is a brilliantly gruff and darkly grounded paean to escapism. It might not quite rank with the time the uncensored version of Rage Against the Machine’s ‘Killing in the Name’ was spun at teatime on a Sunday during the Top 40, but it’s pretty subversive. It’s also indicative of the band’s mass-market potential, given the right exposure.
Awkward buggers that they are, the two sets I saw them perform following the release of Feeling Strange, showcased unreleased material in favour of either the latest album or their rapidly-expanding back-catalogue. These shows hinted squarely at a more direct pop sound, and while Swan Songs is a long way off this, being neither direct or upbeat and poppy, the second half of the album is the closest they’ve come to creating unadulterated pop in the studio.
‘Polyanna Cowgirl’, which featured on last year’s live album, is a big, reverby song that draws together elements of classic dreampop with vintage mid-80s postpunk and even more overtly charty music of the same era. Ah, such different times… And so, they manage to imbue the song with a certain nagging nostalgia, as well as a pining wistfulness. The hefty welter of drums and driving bass render it uniquely Post War Glamour Girls, but the multifaceted harmonies and chiming guitars, expansively produced, bring that cinematic slant to the finished product. The shimmering ‘Golden Time’ wafts and warps gently before ‘Sea of Rains’ drifts into I Like Trains territory, but Smith’s bleak lyrics render it a very different animal: ‘The lust you tried to drag from the soles of his shoes / is the worst excuse for loneliness I’ve ever had to use,’ he reflects, grimly.
The jarring, splintering, ‘Welfare by Prozac’ sees the band ploughing headlong into the Fall-like realms they stomp with aplomb, Smith duelling with Scott like vintage Mark E and Brix, a snarling, spitting inscrutability counterpointed by a melodic yet icy tone, while squalling guitars break over a thick, strolling bassline.
Now, I’m a huge sucker for a monster closing track. On past form, it seems Post War Glamour Girls are masters of the monster closing track (even if Feeling Strange perversely delivered said monster track as the penultimate song in the form of ‘Cannonball Villages) and Swan Songs proves no exception, with the seven-minute ‘Divine Decline’ building from nothing to a raging behemoth of a song. ‘Love and hate stem from the same cell,’ Smith croons, before the whole thing erupts. ‘All I ever wanted /as to be a better to better person / and I’m working on it constantly / working like a dawwwwwg!’ he growls. It’s a storming finale, and no mistake, as the band whip up a dense maelstrom of sound.
As is so often the case, Smith channels a vitriolic rage which one feels is largely directed toward himself. It’s a recurrent aspect of the album’s lyrical content: ‘My manners aren’t amazing / My poetry is pisspoor / My attitude’s an anathema,’ he snarls self-critically on ‘Chipper’. At the risk of too closely, or even mistakenly, aligning the art with the artist lyrics with lyricist and assuming the role or armchair analyst, one can’t help but wonder on the evidence his lyrics, coupled by his driving of the band’s relentless forward trajectory, if he isn’t fighting himself every moment of every day, and if Post War Glamour Girls aren’t some means of his justifying his existence to himself. If this is some kind of therapy, then – from a purely selfish perspective – our best hope is that it takes a good few more albums to purge himself yet, and that the title is more a reference to the conceptual contents of the album rather than an indication of the band’s final sign off. Because, not only is Swan Songs a killer album, but a cohesive and rich set which is the work of a band really hitting their stride and riding on the crest of a wave.*
*The success of this closing punchline is limited, not least of all on account of the fact that swans’ natural habitat is inland and on / by rivers, lakes, and ponds, and therefore unlikely to be tidal or otherwise, meaning that swans are rarely found in an environment where waves are common. But every review needs a punchline, right?
I’m not actually a fan of physical violence. The sight of blood – particularly my own – is enough to make me nauseous or even pass out, and I struggle with pain. And yet I’m also strangely, perversely drawn to violence. I consider the Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom to be a comic masterwork. Why? Because violence at that level becomes absurd, as real as Tom and Jerry. It’s also perhaps important to distinguish art and life. So much brutal music and art is an outlet of the darker psychic states channelled by some of the mildest, sanest people you’re likely to meet. I haven’t met Tristan Shone so can’t vouch for his character, but his work under the Author and Punisher moniker is pretty brutal, and appeals precisely because of it.
The Pressure Mine EP, which finds Shone bring everything in-house to deliver five new tracks, all written, recorded, mixed and self-released by Shone himself balances brutality and beauty. What’s more, there’s a definite trajectory which runs over the course of the EP: something of a downward spiral, if you will, which sees each successive track prove darker, bleaker, heavier and more fucked-up than the one before. It may not be quite as gnarly and doomy s some of its predecessors, but that hardly makes this a stroll in the park and if anything, the absence of eardrum-shredding lasts of noise only accentuates the uncomfortable tension Author and Punisher is capable of creating.
First track ‘Enter This’ is a magnificent, mechanised droning industrial trudge, synths interlacing to forge a dark atmosphere over a battering mid-tempo rhythm. It’s all a backdrop to Shone’s vocals, which balance disconsolation and anguish. While reminiscent of Prettty Hate Machine Nine Inch Nails, it’s also rather more emotionally nuanced. ‘Pressure Lover’ lunges deeper into a woozy, nightmarish fugue, a dense, rumbling bassline and clanking percussion dominating.
‘New World’ warps and grinds, a dislocated discord emerging from the echoes and twisted vocals, and the last track, ‘Black Wand’ comes on like Depeche Mode on a cocktail of Ketamine and LSD. It’s not entirely pleasant, but it is unsettlingly awesome.
The Helen Scarsdale Agency – HMS040 – 2nd December 2016
Christopher Nosnibor
My first encounter with the work of Jim Haynes (the musician, not the writer who rose to a degree of cult prominence in the 1960s) came when The Decline Effect landed with me in 2011. Haynes’ territory is the dark, the ambient, the subterranean, but Throttle and Calibration is an altogether harsher work, which emerged from Haynes’ 2015 residency at MoKS in Estonia, where he would collaborate with and contribute to Simon Whetham’s Active Crossover series.
As the blub accompanying the release on the label’s website explains, ‘Throttle and Calibration is the first in a series of albums that find Haynes digging through the Active Crossover archive and grotesquely exaggerating the details into exploded compositions of volatile dynamics, nerve-exposed dissonance, caustic shortwave signal abuse, and a considerable amount of scarred metal. Marked as one of the more discordant works to date in Haynes’ career, Throttle and Calibration finds company near the atonal compositions from Hermann Nitsch and the sour, industrial collages that pock the Nurse With Wound catalogue. Previously released digitally on Crónica, Throttle & Calibration is fleshed out with an additional 20 minutes of material.’ This time around, the augmented digital release is also accompanied by a cassette edition. But, sadly, no vinyl, and no CD. Sadly because
As the blurb which accompanies the release intimates, discordant is it, and Throttle and Calibration does, most certainly, slot into the space where industrial and avant-garde intersect, and this reissue, expanded to eight tracks from the original five, is an essential work within its field. The album finds Haynes in exploratory mode, and he delves deep into the granular elements of sound over the course of this challenging work.
A long, buffeting rumble, like a distant train or the sound of wind on a mountain-top (if there is no-one there to hear it, does the wind still roar around the rocks?) is the first sound. The harrowing bleakness is but short-lived. Explosive blasts of noise rip and tear like detonations, atmosphere and ear-shredding eruptions. Small sonic ruptures are rendered at such volume and intensity as to inflict sensory and psychological.
What exactly is this? The Arctic wind ripping through an empty water tower? Or the apocalypse? It could be either, and may be both. It’s disorientating as well as full-on. Throttle & Calibration is an album which places sound under the microscope, so to speak. It’s not microtonal, but it is microcosmic, at least on the one hand. But in placing its focus on a small corner of the scene, Haynes then blows it up to A3 and zooms in 500%. The effect is terrifying, bewildering, intense, and the results are immense. In Haynes’ hands, mundane sounds are reforged and take on sinister dimensions. His addressing them from alternative perspectives – up close, amplified – is the key to building a new understanding.
A quiet rattle is annihilated by a roar which melts all definition into a whirling multitextural aural vortex in ‘Tabula Rasa’, and over the course of the album, Haynes repeatedly drags the listener through a succession of vertiginous sonic sinkholes. Single impacts – origins unknown and undisclosed – resonate and decay slowly n heavy atmosphere. The spoken word introduction to ‘It Doesn’t Matter’ sets an eerie tone, but this again is devastated in a tinnitus-inducing wall of screeding noise worthy of Merzbow at his most brutal.
It takes time and focus to peer through the harsh noise to discern the textures. Like stepping into the dark from a brightly-illuminated interior space, it takes time to recalibrate the senses. There are quieter passages, but they’re no less intense and no lighter in tone. Ominous monotone drones and hums hang for aeons; time is suspended in space.
Neither the full-throttle abrasion nor the shady, moody spells of dank mental torture offer anything by way of respite or levity: Jim Haynes is an artist who dwells in darkness and creates work that ranges from the darkest greys to the pitchest of blacks. Throttle & Calibration stands at the darker, more violent end of the spectrum. Uncomfortable unpleasant, and unforgiving, it’s a well-realised plunge into the bowels of a new shade of, rendered from the terrains of the everyday.
Aural Aggravation 