The Helen Scarsdale Agency – 4th August 2023
Christopher Nosnibor
She Spread Sorrow is the musical vehicle for Italian artist Alice Kundalini, and over the course of a number of releases, the majority via Coldspring, she has explored a minimal industrial style, stark yet dense, and characterised by an eerie, whispered vocal delivery.
As the accompanying notes explain, ‘Orchid Seeds was originally published as part of the instantly out of print On Corrosion – a 10 cassette anthology from 2019 that was housed in a handcrafted wooden box and featuring full albums from Kleistwahr, Neutral, Pinkcourtesyphone, Alice Kemp, She Spread Sorrow, G*Park, Relay For Death, Francisco Meirino, Fossil Aerosol Mining Project, and Himukalt. The collection also stood as the 50th release for The Helen Scarsdale Agency, an imprint founded in 2003 and dedicated to post-industrial research, recombinant noise, surrealist demolition, existential vacancy and then some.’
Four years on, it finally gets a standalone release, both digitally and on vinyl.
Kundalini states that the album, “is about 5 different women of my family. Each track is about one of them with their difficult story and strengths. My family is totally destroyed now, no relation between anyone, but in the past there was a strong tradition of women with
interesting personalities.”
And even by the standards of She Spread Sorrow, Orchid Seeds is stark and eerie, dark and unsettling. The reverby, robotic vocals that whisper and moan over the sparse backing of ‘The Solitude in the Giant House’ may set the tone, and with a vintage drum machine thudding and clopping in the background, it has that late 70s vibe – somewhere between Young Marble Giants and cabaret Voltaire.
Things twist into darker territory with ‘Star’ as strains of feedback and grating, serrated synth ripples fizz and crackle beneath her gasping monotone vocal. This is much more reminiscent of Throbbing Gristle. It makes for a tense eight minutes: so often, when acts capable of producing great and heartstopping noise show such restraint as to keep it minimal yet audibly straining, the effect is amplified. This is one such composition; you find yourself moving to the edge of your seat, limbs tensing, waiting for something that never comes.
While the songs are about different people, ‘She Didn’t Care’ and ‘Queen of Guilt’ show opposite aspects of a theme, and perhaps provide some insight into the dynamic of the familial relationships and why they collapsed. The former is built around a stammering beat and hovering, hesitant synthesized organ hum; the sound and overall performance is primitive, immediate, while in contrast, the latter is dominated by a slow, heavy beat defined by a thunderous, reverberating snare, over which a simple synth wanders as echoed vocals drift, fuzzed and breathy and way off in the distance. The effect is some king of industrial dub, and it’s unsettling but not altogether unpleasant, perhaps because it contains stripped-back elements of common pop and dub tropes and so its oddness is countered by a certain stylistic familiarity.
The fifth and final track, ‘The Fortune of Others’, builds through serrated oscillations to grind away for what feels like a slow-throbbing eternity of electronic claustrophobia. It’s important to bear in mind the context: this is an album that’s equal parts narrative and concept, and the execution really pushes the concept to the fore, building the atmospheres of moments missed.
Without more detail – and let’s face it, more detail would likely be unsettling, even potentially traumatic – it’s impossible to determine the full extent of the meaning and also the pain behind the title. But for better or worse, the prospect of taking a firm grasp on the album seems to grow ever further away as it progresses. There is something magnificently and also frustratingly elusive about Orchid Seeds, and however deep you delve, however long you seek it, one suspects it will remain eternally beyond grasp.
AA
Aural Aggravation 