Posts Tagged ‘disorientating’

Autorhythm – Songs for the Nervous System

Posted: 10 May 2023 in Albums
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Thanatosis – THT23 – 12th May 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

I might have ordinarily made some quip about my own system and that of many being nervous, but then I read the accompanying notes and thought better of it, as this album, the debut full-length album by Swedish producer Autorhythm, aka Joakim Forsgren, a visual artist and former bassist of several punk and rock groups, comes from, if not from a dark place, then certainly a serious one.

As the notes explain, ‘Forsgren started to work on what was to become Songs for the Nervous System in 2015, after having been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. The album is a series of intuitive compositions drawing from the latest medical research on how light and sound at specific frequencies has a potential to affect bodily functions, down to the cellular level. The resulting contemporary but surprisingly human electronic music is a dynamic mix of driving rhythms and meditative soundscapes. While the polyrhythmic beats suggest a kinship to some contemporary club music, the work of Brian Eno would be a more obvious point of reference in its genreless amalgamation of music, life and conceptual art.

‘Except for mixing and minor adjustments computers were shunned, with Forsgren instead relying on an assortment of synthesizers, of roughly the same age as himself and thus all members of the pre-digital generation. Conventional sounds and solutions were avoided, as much out of incapacity as imagination. The name and the impetus for the music were born out of the question of what music his electronic devices and machines themselves would play if Forsgren were not able to play them himself.’

The album contains six tracks, most of which sit within the midrange of around four to seven minutes in length. The first, ‘Clairvoyance’ is seven minutes of squelch and pop dance music that has a real analogue vibe and a nagging insistence, as well as a hint of Factory Floor. The beat doesn’t alter, but the tones shift and layers build.

Sequencing matters here, and two shorter compositions, ‘Doom Variations’; and ‘Neuropathic Factors’ – complimentary pieces which perhaps render the album’s objective to present ‘intuitive compositions drawing from the latest medical research on how light and sound at specific frequencies has a potential to affect bodily functions, down to the cellular level’ most apparent: there are some unusual sounds here, and the interplay between them is unusual and not always easy to consume in comfort. It’s hard to explain just how these pieces are affecting – but they are. Perhaps a greater understanding of the theory and practise may help, but listening to Songs for the Nervous System leaves me feeling too drained to do anything much.

Opening side two, ‘Plasticity’ is a six-minute slow-trip-hop throb kicked along by a vintage drum machine. The bass groove is one you can nod along to, but there are rather more uncomfortable, discordant elements and a strange warping drag that makes time twist and stretch a little. It’s the time signatures: they don’t seem to match up and induce a deep dizziness and a sense of disorientation, of discombobulation. It’s an overload, too much too process. Around the midpoint, amidst laser snaps and synth bass pulations, it slopes down to a point where you feel very much like you’ve stopped for a break before grind an in to our infinite arrival at our, final destination. That final destination is the album’s longest track by far: ‘Intercelular Communication’ presents as an extended audio research piece, and it’s well-realised, but difficult.

Three times I’ve tried to write this review: three times I’ve listened to this album and it’s left me feeling tired and strange and my writing has stalled. Perhaps I’m tired, or perhaps this really does reach the most inaccessible parts, and perhaps it does speak on a very different level.

AA

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Dolores Mondo Stash – Folklore Of Despair

Posted: 31 May 2021 in Albums
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Cruel Nature Records – 11th June 2021

Christopher Nosnibor

We’re in eerie electronics territory here. Haunting, creepy. Suspenseful. There’s something of a vintage sci-fi feel to this nightmarish trip, as gurgles and scrapes bibble up through swamps of whistling organ-like drones. It’s a dark record, but not because it relies on heavy drones, low, rumbling, doomy bass, hard volume or distortion: Folklore Of Despair worms its way into the psyche, prodding and poking stealthily into the recesses of the subconscious, gently rubbing and scratching at those small, nagging uncertainties that stem from the fear of the unknown. Whistles and bleeps intermingle with tense violin-type drones and quibbling analogue sounds, spooky, spectral notes and crashing crunches which disrupt the flow and create a different kind of tension, one that feels like things are going out of control and colliding on every side, a catastrophic nightmare where carks skid into one another as every third driver find their steering no longer works or their brakes have been cut. It’s disorientating, and the effect is so strong because everything about the album is so unpredictable.

There are no conventional structures here, or even any clear structures at all. Like the best suspense movies, the unexpected always occurs unexpectedly. The tense build-ups are often false markers, but then again, there’s not much letup in the tension, which they sustain and sustain, and your nerves are jangling because your gut tells you ‘something isn’t right’.

Things get really weird really fast: second track ‘Darkness is Driving the Machine of Debauchery’ is quite headfuck, as glitches and warping sounding like a stretched and buckled tape struggling to traverse over the heads. It squeaks and squeals and sounds as if whatever was recorded on the tape before is bleeding through, like voices from the other side – I’m reminded tangentially of the 7” containing sample recordings of voices from the ether that accompany Konstantin Raudive’s 1971 book, Breakthrough: An Amazing Experiment in Electronic Communication with the Dead (something that would feed into the theories expounded by William Burroughs on the tape experiments he conducted withy Brion Gysin).

An actual voice, murky, muffled, drifts, disembodied and strange through the creeping chords on ‘If the Forest Ate the Trees’, where the notes drift like fog, but there’s more to its being unsettling than that: there’s an otherness, a strangeness you can’t quite put your finger on, as if maybe the drifting fog in the graveyard scene has been filmed in reverse. It’s the fact it’s difficult to pinpoint that heightens the effect so.

Thunderous beats – distant, as if playing in a club three blocks away – pulse, deep, and bassy, on ‘Floral Patterned Gearshift’, and the sound is all but drowned out by the shrill, clamorous shrieking synapse-shattering tweets that flurry like a swarm of bats scurrying and flurrying. You have to fight the impulse to duck to avoid the aural assailants, invisible yet somehow tangible in the mind’s eye.

At times, everything simply collapses into chaotic cacophony. It’s hard to process, and ever harder to digest. Folklore Of Despair is a complex and uncomfortable album, which is nothing the title hints it may be. I’m not even entirely certain what it is, but it leaves you feeling jittery, jumpy and on edge.

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