Posts Tagged ‘festive’

Mortality Tables – Grouch Thoraces (II)

Posted: 28 December 2024 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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Mortality Tables – 24 December 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

There’s something about Christmas that really does send people spiralling in one of two directions. The people who absolutely love it seem to love it just too much to be considered sane, and this year has been one of the worst I can remember for people actually buying chocolate and putting their trees up almost immediately after hallowe’en. Amusingly, I’m seeing them taking down their trees and decorations from Boxing Day, declaring that they’ve had enough now. Well, it’s hardly surprising after three months. I really for feel sorry for the kids of these deranged households: it must be quite confusing for them, not least of all seeing their parents troughing whole selection boxes to themselves in November as they effervesce about the Christmas spirit and plaster their hedges, bushes, trees, and house frontages with lights – which is as trashy as it is environmentally unsound (‘oh, we use green energy, it’s 90% nuclear now!’) – only to tear them down a whole tend days before twelfth night. But these are the kind of people who call what they do – things like going to work and parenting – ‘adulting’ and piss and moan about it on social media, while posting pics of their decorations at the start of November. And it’s cunts like these who make me loathe Christmas with a passion I didn’t even know I possessed. They spoil it for more moderate, more sane people – and people who just despise other people and herd mentality twattery in general.

And so I’m with Mat Smith, the main man behind Mortality Tables, and am one hundred percent into ‘Grouch Thoraces (II)’, pitched as ‘The festive sentiments of a misanthrope, processed into dark and enveloping ambient texture. An updated version of a release from 2023’. In fact, I consider this to be a release that stands alongside – in spirit, if not necessarily sonically – with my own Festive Fifty noisework, released on December 20th. Against the tidal wash of syrupy, saccharine Christmas tunes – shit covers or endless rereleases or just the same toss that’s been the staple of the airwaves since the 70s and even earlier – nothing says ‘fuck this commercial Christmas shit’ like some dark noise.

‘Grouch Thoraces’, released on Christmas Eve in 2023 was a dank, murky cut, presenting just shy of five minutes of the most rumbly dark ambience. This year – to use a phrase I despise almost as much as the cheery festivity fanatics who bounce around the office in Christmas jumpers and Deely boppers or reindeer antler headbands and start arranging secret Santa and team drinks and buffets from the middle of November – Smith has doubled down on his anti-festive sentiments with a reworked ‘Grouch Thoraces’: this time it’s even darker and danker and almost eight minutes in length. It’s a churning, disorientating mess of stuff thrown together, found sounds and elongates drones twisting together to forge a thick morass of unsettling, uncomfortable noise. According to the credits, there’s a vocal by Carroll Spinney, but it’s submerged in the slow-sinking swamp. There are chimes clattering in the dark whorl of purgatorial noise, but they sound like the ching of broken decorations swinging in a post-apocalyptic nuclear wind as the survivors crawl, blind, skin peeling, through the ruins of what little remains.

On its own merits, this is a strong dark ambient work with a certain edge: in context, it speaks. Fuck this festive shit, fuck this commercial shit, fuck the obligation to socialise: let’s celebrate stepping back from it all and just getting through it, without feeling the need to pretend that we love any of it. We misanthropes need to stand together.

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Gintas K – Jingles With Bells

Posted: 14 November 2022 in Albums
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Birdfriend – 2nd September 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

Gintas K is at it again! Last year I was compelled to break my vow not to listen to, or write a word about any Christmas-themed releases on account of his album, Christmas Till the End, released on December 25th, and now, just when I’m getting into full foaming at the mouth mode over how there’s Christmas stuff everywhere since the week before Halloween, I discover he dropped an album bearing a title with overly festive connotations, which was, in fact, released at the start of September – and which was recorded in July!

Jingles With Bells was, like a number of other works, recorded live, using computer, midi keyboard, and controller.

Despite the album title being in English, and offering something of a play on words with jingles suggesting advertisements as well as festive chimes, the track titles are in K’s native Lithianian, and I’m not entirely sure I trust Google translate when it tells me that ‘irgi dugnai auksti ir aopacia garsai gerai visai’ is ‘the bottoms are also high and the background sounds are quite good’ – although it is a fair description of the six-and-a-half-minute opener. It begins with sparse drips and drops echoing as if in a giant cave, before Kraptavičius introduces his trademark flickering electrostatic glitches and whirs. The layers build as crunches and crackles clamour into a frenzy of fucked-up robotics.

Stammering, fractured beats collide and disperse in all directions, a wheezing, groaning, creaking array of electronic simulations and rapidfire thumps like hammers and nail guns, jazz percussion and despite the complete absence of any actual percussion, Jingles With Bells is marked by a complete absence of any actual beats, instead being driven by clattering short sounds that resemble beats and even trick the ear and mind with their (ar)rhythmic explosions. The last thirty seconds of the seven-minute ‘is to pacio tesinys geras’ (which may or may not translate as therefore the continuation is good’ is marked by silence, and it’s a welcome reprieve from the blindingly busy blitzkrieg blast.

‘istisinis is to pacio’ is a snarling drilling grind of bass, but also introduces the first jangling treble that might pass at a distance as a jingle, but it more resembles a dentist’s drill than sleigh, and the whole experience is less jingle and more nerve-jangling and uncomfortable.

Echoic droplets and sounds reminiscent of jangling jamjars trickle through the album, and the ten-minute monster that is ‘varpeliai noiz bugn bosas neblogai’ (‘bells noiz bugn boss not bad’ – yeah… nah) begins with what sounds like a bath being run down the plug and a crackling blast of blocks of distortion against – finally – chimes. But against a creaking croaking, cracking low end like the bow of a wooden ship breaking against rocks in a storm, those melodic tinkles soon build to forge an oppressive, head-compressing sonic torture; it’s simply all too much. But too much is never enough, and as such, it all adds up to another album that bears all of Gintas K’s quite unique hallmarks forged from some mangled laptop machinations, manipulated in real time.

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