Aural Aggravation

Cruel Nature Records – 16th June 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

After calling time on Head of David in 1991, Stephen R. Burroughs re-emerged in 2013 as Stephen Ah Burroughs with recording as TUNNELS OF ĀH, and offering a dark ambient focus. Since the first TUNNELS OF ĀH album, Lost Corridors, Burroughs has maintained a steady output through the years, also working under the FRAG moniker (although this project was conceived in the ‘90s, it wasn’t until much later that recordings would begin to be released).

THE SMEARED CLOTH (2012 – 2018 UNEARTHED), as the title suggests, collects unreleased recordings made between 2012 and 2018 and more recently excavated. You couldn’t exactly call this a cash-in: this is ultra-niche and it is, however, a valuable dredging of the archives.

The cassette release is a double, with volume 1 spanning 2012-2015, and volume 2 spanning 2016-2018, and while an album conceived as an end-to-end listening experience would suffer from the enforced breaks, the (cruel) nature of this release means this isn’t an issue.

Oftentimes, with dark ambient works it feels as if the sounds are drifting out of the air rather than being forged by any kind of instruments, but the warping drones of the first composition, ‘Aceldama’, twist and grind and there’s quite analogue synth feel to it, with distant vocals adding an intriguing depth. In contrast, ‘Garlic Blades’ feels as if it something that has come not from instruments, but from a pair of bellows wheezing in a dank underworld. The two sonic facets come together on the third track, the heavy, stark ‘Brute World’ where drifting drones and creeping atmospherics filter over tense, brooding strings, and this all provides the backdrop to barely-audible incantations in a mystical tongue.

These contrasting elements highlight the range of the recordings featured on THE SMEARED CLOTH – and with twenty-one tracks, the majority of which are over six minutes in length, it’s a substantial document. But despite the contrasts – and the span of time over which the recordings were made – there is a certain cohesion to this collection, and the tracks run from one to the next without there being any jarring leaps.

Repetition is a common feature of the compositions; ‘Keys King at the Womb Again’ is centred around a short loop of a heavy industrial scraping, which equally sounds like a pained bark – or a pained barf, for that matter. Because Burroughs does venture into harsher territories at times, there’s some uncomfortable listening to be had among the drones and hums, scrapes and chants, and there are extended passages of quiet, ominous ambience, sounds without definition or any indication of origin ebb, flow, and eddy, to unsettling effect. The mid-section in particular is given to these more abstract forms, the sounds muted and creeping slowly, stealthily. ‘The Cloth is Smeared’ is exemplary: the words, spoken in an even, ritualistic tone, echo amidst creaking, creeping hums and clattering , and while stylistically worlds away, it harks back to themes that go back to early Head of David: the viscerality of ‘Smears’ (it’s a word which carries so much power and evokes a real revulsion, and religion, as represented by cuts like ‘Newly Shaven Saint’. Somewhat annoyingly and inappropriately because my brain is not my friend, the phrase ‘touching cloth’ insists on thrusting itself into my mind – and my mind wanders as it finds itself led through the dark, metal-edged passages of ‘Great Darkness’ with churning noise and what sounds like the clank of metal against railings, as if in protest or otherwise or trapped inside a prison cell. ‘Metallic Shoes and a Sword’ is particularly sharp-edged in the abrasive edges that saw through the swampiness of the damp gloaming, before ‘Gnosis of Self Loathing’ and ‘Amorphophallus’ drive us deep into some gruesomely dark spaces, suffocating, strangling, asphyxiating in their density: these are the sounds of slow punishment.

While the pieces themselves are (essentially) instrumental, the titles convey a great deal and ‘Circumcision (Hunter Christ)’ and ‘The Castrate Became An Angel’ largely speak for themselves. The latter is minimal, jittery, tense, like listening to the sounds in the walls at night and wondering if you have some kind in infestation. And perhaps. perhaps you do, but it’s in your body, inside your skull. There’s nothing here to calm that anxiety, only crackling distortion and drones and groans, grumbling, gut-shaking rumbles.

THE SMEARED CLOTH hangs dark, damp, and heavy, and rather than sounding like a bunch of straggly offcuts, it showcases the depth and breadth of Burroughs’ work, that the works in progress and outtakes and otherwise cast off and forgotten recordings are enough to make two full-length albums of consistent quality.

AA