Genre: Noise / Ambient / Experimental
1. Uranium Mines
2. Nuclear Storms
3. Suffocate.Acid Vomit
4. Disfigured Children.Radioactive Generation
5. Human Genocide
Somewhere between NoN’s “Blood and Flame” and Stockhausen’s best, more abstract moments – that’s what this album calls to mind. For its sheer abrasiveness, the record deserves honorable mention. The various frequencies this record will send any household cat running out of the room – both low and guttural, or screeching into the pain threshold. Like all great noise releases, you need to play it at maximum volume for full effect. There’s also the use of what sounds like overloading signals, so that many of the synthesized sounds create murky tonalities and discordant harmonics not present otherwise. The album makes masterful use of this “found” dissonance. Yet for all the chaos, at no point does the record loose focus. It’s a very sharp clear picture that 20.SV delivers on this album. An undirected orchestration is achieved that reflects the unconscious behavior of that brutish beast man, and his ever-present dual urge for the conquest that is at once self-destruction.
Most importantly, this album just sounds interesting. Even after listening to it over and over, it still holds attention and doesn’t loose its power. The album truly stands apart among similar releases – while I’m sure much of this was improvised, there’s a sense of direction or narrative to each piece. But the narrative is very intuitive.
The first four tracks are all relatively short each sort of building up to the next. The climax is the last 30 minutes plus piece, aptly titled “Human Genocide” that takes up the album’s bulk. Moving through various phases of sonic clashes, the pieces actually sounds like a war – be it a nuclear war of just another cluster bomb being dropped on a major urban center; such is warfare in the 21st Century. Sounds of missiles launched, exploding and abstracts waves of noise that sound like the debris of civilization being careless blown about – that’s what this piece calls to mind. But even with this obvious theme, the record still remains open to interpretation, like all good records should. That is to say, the noise stands up on its own without any theme or explanation.
“Avid Vomit Human Genocide” fully succeeds in creating an atmosphere of final nuclear confrontation. Cold and remote, the tonalities 20.SV create sound like a berserk computer programmed to eliminate the human race with obscene thoroughness and utter disregard for anything remotely humane. The project/band’s name refers to the dosage of radiation lethal to the human organism. This is a one-man project from Lebanon. I’m not familiar at all with the two related Black Metal projects (Veinen and Kafan) that have spawned from Xardas, the personality behind 20.SV, so unfortunately I can’t say much about either. I also have read that the album is actually a compilation of two previously released cassette demos. What I can say with certainty is that “Acid Vomit.Human Genocide” is a powerful release worthy of its title.
