28th August 2023
Christopher Nosnibor
Techno/industrial is rather like craft beer. It was invented in Europe (KMFDM are obvious progenitors back in 1984), before being embraced in the States and with Wax Trax! almost singlehandedly spawning a factory for the genre, which in turn found significant popularity in mainland Europe, particularly in Germany.
English exponents are rather harder to come by, although Benjamin Blank, who has been working under the Binary Order moniker since 2008, is a worthy representative. His words on this latest single, lifted from forthcoming album The Future Belongs to the Mad (out at the end of November), illustrate perfectly why this mode of music is ideally-suited to life in Shit Britain: “’Slow Blade” is a reflection of the decline I’ve witnessed in my lifetime. It’s a decline that has gotten us to a point where we are more concerned with passing the blame than attempting fix the decay that has rotted away at us all, leaving many despondent and lost, myself included.”
I’m writing this in the week that, as schools are due to reopen after the summer break, hundreds are being forced to close or otherwise relocate students because the buildings are unsafe, built using cheap concrete which is structurally unsound and liable to collapse without notice. Our government has known about this for years, but has failed to act. And, indeed, over the last thirteen years, our infrastructure has been slowly crumbling – our roads, our sewerage systems, our rail network – as profit has been put before people, and we’ve become embroiled in petty patriotism, culture wars, and outright horrible racism and prejudice of every kind. It’s no wonder Blank feels as if our small island is sinking while the only things rising are rates of poverty, depression, and other mental health issues.
‘Slow Blade’ feels like a significant progression from the material which comprised previous album, Messages from the Deep. While it incorporated guitar elements, it was very much in the vein of early Nine Inch Nails, the sounds crisp, tight, overtly synth-dominated. In contrast, ‘Slow Blade’ is far more gnarly, far dirtier, more raw, rough-hewn, and simply more metal. And not the kind of metal you’d likely associate with industrial – the likes of Ministry or perhaps Godflesh – but gritty, murky black shit smashed together with the guitar slabs of nu-metal. At least, to begin with – because ‘Slow Blade’ is a song of psychotic multiple personalities, and a song in three parts.
Unexpectedly, the songs slows and goes first expansive and melodic, then explodes in a frenzy of stuttering techno beats that’s more Fixed than Pretty Hate Machine, and then it brings the two elements together in the third and final stage. While to suggest it has a particular arc, narrative or otherwise, feels like something of a stretch, ‘Slow Blade’ transitions through a series of emotions, from blind raging fury to the acceptance of defeat as everything collapses. The end is final. And we all know it’s coming.
AA
7th July 2023
Christopher Nosnibor
When it comes to band names, metal is one of those genres that has a unique way of throwing out monikers that mean you know it’s a metal band just from the name – unless, of course, you can’t read it because of the unintelligible spiky logo, in which case you absolutely know what to expect without even knowing the name. Indian deathgrind act are a quintessential example. Just look at that cover! It’s all the thorns – and it encapsulates the listening experience perfectly. Yes, it’s sharp, it’s a set of songs that snags and tears at your skin and your psyche.
Fifteen years into their career, Carnal is their third album, and if it sounds like that’s perhaps slow progress, the eight brutal cuts on here suggest that the time goes into compressing everything down to its tightest, densest form, honing it to the point at which its mass and velocity is absolutely optimal.
With the exception of the six-minute epic closer and the forty-one second blast of mid-album track ‘Insidious’, the songs range between around three-and-a-half and four minutes – and they pack everything into these compact sonic slabs. They don’t do fiddly, twiddly stuff, and there are no squealy notes or solos, apart from on ‘Bodysnatcher’ where they work -and wank – all the frets in a frenzy: this is music which sounds like it’s the output of a car-crusher – compacted, mangled, brutally fucked and as dense and weighty as it gets.
The album’s themes are clear from the song titles, with opener ‘Son of Sam’ setting the tone, ahead of ‘Bind Torture Kill’, ‘Body Snatcher’, and ‘Alter of Putridity’, which, like the font and everything else, pretty much speak for themselves. They’re well into their serial killer shit, but as I observed just the other day, this stuff is mainstream now. Pouring over mass murder and serial killing is no longer the domain of trenchcoat-wearing loners who aspire to wreak their own revenge on this cruel world; it’s David Tennent on ITV scoring eleven million viewers per episode.
That doesn’t mean that this kind of brutal tempestuous racket is mainstream, but people can no longer judge the work of a band like Gutlsit as sick or perverse when their subject matter is primetime. We’re all murder junkies.
‘The Killing Joke’ opens with a sample from an interview with notorious sadistic serial killer John Wayne Gacey (who makes Son of Sam with his seven victims look like a mere hobbyist), saying ‘The dead won’t bother you. It’s the living you gotta worry about’. Gracey may have been somewhat flippant in his remarks, but he had something of a point.
Gutslit sound neither dead nor living, their grating attacks sounding more like the undead on EST, a least vocally, and they go all out to deliver punishing intensity on a satanic level. It’s a churning mass of guitars that grinds at your guts as beats blast so fast as to blur to a flickering rattling sound rather than form an overtly structured rhythm. The obligatory guttural vocals growl and snarl, switching between styles fast and often between growl and barks, coughs and vomiting streams of vowels. It’s frenzied, demonic, furious. It sounds murderous, it sounds brutal, disturbed and disturbing.
‘Primeval’ is slow in terms of chords, but countered by a thunderous rush of beats, which renders it disorientating, harsh, and high on impact, and as a whole Carnal is pretty nasty – just as intended.
AA
Green Recordings – 30th November 2018 (Big Mouth)
A Gradual Decline is the debut album by CUTS, the audio-visual project of composer and filmmaker Anthony Tombling Jr. It follows the release of the EP ‘A Slow Decay’, which came out in October. The titles suggest a trajectory, an overarching theme, and Tombling’s preoccupation with environmental issues and global warming is the key here. “We are living in the age of the Anthropocene and it feels like everything is in decline,” he says.
He explains the process and inspiration as follows: “I have tried to make a record that feels like it’s all come from one place. My only musical influence on this was William Basinski’s ‘Disintegration Loops’. Not the music, but the process. The idea of a decline in sound really suited the concept of this record. All this music and instrumentation trapped in this declining digital signal. I wanted it to sound brittle and precarious. I also wanted to avoid doing overly dark material, opting instead for something that was more fragile, melancholic and even hopeful in moments.”
As such, this is a concept work, and a concept that’s conveyed by the medium of chilled-out electronica, propelled by quite mellow beats. And while there is a melancholy hue to the instrumentation it doesn’t exactly say ‘potential collapse of civilisation’ or ‘global warming: aaargh, we’re all fucked’. This is no criticism: it’s hard to reconcile the now with the future prospects was talk about endlessly but never seem to reach. Even positioning the Anthropocene is problematic, although using the increasingly popular placing of post-1945 as the marker, with that year being tipped by the Geological Society as The Great Acceleration in terms of the impact of human activity on climate and environment as the defining feature of the current geological age, is perhaps instructive in the context of Tombling’s comments that “we’re in a moment where extinction is regular. I wanted this record to reflect these frailties.”
The press release promises ‘11 widescreen, electronic compositions in response to global political and environmental breakdown,’ and explains how A Gradual Decline addresses the planet’s current fragility using actual field recordings of ice collapsing from glaciers’. This isn’t apparent in the music itself, and a lot of A Gradual Decline given to quite simple, straight-ahead electronica, and while there are warping synth washes to be found hither and thither, it’s gentle and genteel and doesn’t instil a gut-churning sense of panic. Then again, some of the pieces are quite stark and spacious.
The album’s trajectory is – as the title suggests – gradual. The pace slows and structures become increasingly loose and delineated, beats more fractured and fragmented as it progresses. It’s fitting: the slide into increasingly turbulent weather isn’t something noticeable on a day-to-day basis and on a global scale, rapid change is relative.
But by the time the listener has drifted through the rippling piano rolls and low-stuttering pulsations of ‘Maboroshi’ and the dilapidated slow-drone ambience of ‘Fear of Everything’ which suddenly vanishes to nothing after thirteen minutes of formless drift, the sense of journey becomes finally apparent.
A Gradual Decline is an album that makes more sense and grows in appeal with time to absorb and assimilate, to reflect and to refocus. Given time, A Gradual Decline makes sense. Its just a shame we don’t have the luxury of time to save the planet.
AA
Aural Aggravation 