Posts Tagged ‘existential’

Binary Order – The Future Belongs To The Mad

Posted: 21 November 2023 in Albums
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28th November 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Following on from the interim Thrown Away EP release, which boldly, and perhaps somewhat unexpectedly – pitched a Papa Roach cover front and foremost, and taster single release in the shape of ‘Slow Blade’, Binary Order drop the new album The Future Belongs To The Mad. In doing so, Benjamin Blank’s techno / industrial / metal vehicle reveal just how much has evolved since previous album, Messages from the Deep.

So many acts in this musical sphere seem to exist in a sort of genre-specific bubble, grinding out endless psychodramas centred around dark sexuality and degradation, having taken the first couple of Nine Inch Nails albums as templates for their musical existence. Fair enough. It’s easy enough to become embroiled and fixated on the relentless turbulence of your angst and relationship disconnects and how they fuck with your head. At least when you’re a fucked-up hormone-explosion, which is pretty much anyone’s teens and probably twenties.

This could perhaps explain in part the difference in focus of The Future Belongs To The Mad. Blank has been operating as Binary Order since 2008 – the same year I got serious about reviewing music – and it’s been a ling and tempestuous fifteen years. Older, wiser… and more bewildered by the world.  Blank’s statement which accompanies the album is stark, bold, bleak, and honest – but at the same time suitably vague, and I shall quote in full in order to provide context:

“It’s never easy to be honest about these kind of things, but I feel it’s important with this release to be so. The Future Belongs To The Mad was written during possibly the most difficult period I’ve ever had to get through – a period I’m not actually done dealing with – and one from which I now fear I shall never depart.

This album is an expression of my own inability to find meaning or purpose in life. And the utter disdain and emotional distraught that comes from the accumulation of living like that year, after year, after year. With this album I’ve managed to turn something that is for all intents and purposes destroying me, and created what is without any doubt in my mind, the greatest accomplishment of my life.

I don’t know if there is going to be anymore Binary Order after this. Finishing this album felt like an impossibility at one point, and now it’s done I feel like I am too. I hope anyone who listens to this can find something of value for within it. If not then I just appreciate having this platform to express myself in this way because it has kept me alive.”

Whether so much of this existential trauma was triggered by lockdown or other personal circumstances, we don’t know, but the fact that Blank is British and subject to the daily hell of living in a country in turmoil and seemingly hell-bent on utterly fucking itself and its citizens is worth highlighting, in that this seems to reflect the mood of many people I know. It feels as though the mad have already taken over and are stealing the futures of the rest of us, and our children. From this vantage, you look in, you look out, and you feel hollow and broken.

The Future Belongs To The Mad is harsh, abrasive, and rages hard from the offset, with the blistering hot guitar inferno of ‘Consternation’, which judders and stutters, halts and race, blasts of noise slamming in your face in the first bars. The vocals alternate between snarling, impenetrable metal roars in the verses and cleanly melodic choruses abrim with bombast.

Elsewhere, ‘Perfect World’ builds to a truly magnificently anthemic climax, while ‘Feel Again’ brings some crisp dark electropop that calls to mind mid/late 80s Depeche Mode with its layered synths and backed-off but crunchy guitars, over which Blank wrestles with his entire soul over darker feelings. There are dank instrumental interludes to be found during the course of the album. ‘Hope is a Mistake’ is every bit as bleak and life-sapping as the title suggests. ‘Skin’ is tense and claustrophobic electro, but again, there are segments which are smooth and soulful. ‘Face Beneath The Waves’ is a black blast of aggrotech metal / glichy electro / industrial / emo which takes your face off then soothes your raw flesh with some nicely melodic passages.

If nu-metal at its best / worst battled with stylistic duality, Binary Order carry this through to a Jekyll and Hyde manifestation of internal struggle on The Future Belongs To The Mad, which incorporates elements of numerous genres. These contrasts serve the album well in terms of it being a dynamic, energised offering, but such schizophrenic sonic stylings make for an album that’s almost pitched at two or more different markets. But more than anything, it feels as if these stylistic conflicts are the manifestation of Blank’s internal conflicts – and with this interpretation, The Future Belongs To The Mad works well. Blank hauls the listener through his difficult experiences, one at a time, and you bear witness to his self-torment a song at a time.

The Future Belongs To The Mad is not an easy album, but it is one that carries much weight and is well-realised. I won’t be alone in hoping it isn’t the last of Binary Order – but if it is, it’s a grand final statement.

AA

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Open to the Sea – Another Year Is Over

Posted: 1 January 2020 in Albums
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Midira Records – MD080 – 13th December 2019

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s new year’s day, 2020. Like many, I’ve spent the last few weeks reflecting on the passing year: I usually do around this time, remembering where I was a year ago, two, three, five, ten years previous. Wondering precisely what I’ve got to show for it. that slow, sad, weight of nostalgia as the images captured in memories fade and curl around at the corners. Wondering: was I actually happier then, less prone to panic, or is this simply rose-tinting, psychological refuge in the comfort of the known, the life lived, rather than the fearful prospect of the unknown future? Such conflict, such dichotomy and dilemma.

And so, another year is indeed over, and here we are, staring into the void. Teetering on the brink of the abyss of a new decade in a post-fact, post-truth world where the capitalist world teeters on the brink of self-induced collapse and global climate catastrophe. And there is no success like failure.

We’ve failed as individuals, and as a species. The year is over… so what is there in prospect?

Open to the Sea’s new album, released late December provides the soothing backdrop to my existential strife, and it’s barely there for the most part. And yet, it’s there just enough: understated, yet still clearly stated.

The press release provides some useful insight into the album’s origins and its creators: ‘Open To The Sea is the collaboration project of Matteo Uggeri and Enrico Coniglio and Another Year Is Over is their second album. While Coniglio focusses on guitar, synths and other instruments, Uggeri adds samples and field recordings to create a soundcosmos full of tiny melodies and themes with appereance by some guest musicians on drums, trumpet and cello. That would make a perfect experimental ambient album with jazzy moments, but Uggeri & Coniglio push this release further by adding some vocals to most of the tracks by inviting guest singers like Dominic Appleton (This Mortal Coil) or Lau Nau from Finland.’

Minimal post-rock forged from sparse piano notes which drift into a rarefied air, spun with subtle, near-subliminal swirls of ambience, and stammering, glitching beats that hammer like a palpating heartbeat rattling in a tense ribcage, and picked guitar notes waft into the ether.

With different vocalists contributing to the various tracks, the tone and feel changes: ‘Heavy Like a Falling Leaf’ is soft, airy, yet poised, while ‘Uninvited Ghost’ and ‘Crystal Dog Barks’ feature a spoken word lyrical delivery, which in some respects changes both the dynamic and balance, and the function of the musical accompaniment, rendering the piece less a song and more of a narrative with instrumental backing.

‘Duduk Confession’ is hushed, brooding, with haunting strings and ominous hums lingering in the shadows, and on ‘Tapes and Cows Pt 1’, lonely brass wails softly over low notes to produce the most forlorn jazz imaginable. Scraping strings and frosty synth flickers accompany the deepest woe, which gradually evolves into warped space-age electro that melts into some warbling jazz trumpet.

The penultimate composition, ‘facing the waves’ is by far the most conventionally ‘songy’ of the ten, with a straight-ahead drum rhythm and solid piano providing the primary instrumentation on a whispy indie/shoegaze work. The fading refrain of ‘time now to start again’ is sung by a layered-up vocal set and, unexpectedly, Interpol come to mind.

The final song, ‘Another Year is Over, Let’s wait for Springtime’, with its whispering dialogue and soft dulcimer shimmers and soft, snowy strings that glide smoothly into the darkest corners, reminds me of my urge to hibernate, but also the fact that everything passes in time and everything is cyclical. Yesterday, today, tomorrow – they’re all points on a circle, and as linear as life lived is, as sure as birth and death, one year will follow the last, and so it will go on, whether we’re here or not.

AA

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