Genre: Ambient / Noise / Experimental

01. Track one
02. Track two

The Sounds Of Earth call themselves “psycho acoustic ambient noise”, they come from Salzburg, Austria and count two members, Chris Huber, and Andi Haas. Chris Huber from what I gathered surfing round the Theremin Noise Club website, also runs the label. Among other things he does artwork, there are some pretty good samples in there – I especially liked the poster stuff.

“And Then Came The Fire” consists of two tracks, about 30 minutes each, that take to immersing the listener in a deeply psychedelic, warlike atmosphere. The first track begins with earsplitting machine guns and a line from "Dark City" by Alex Proyas: “First, there was darkness. Then came The Strangers. They were a race as old as time itself…” and so on. Shooting sounds exist everywhere, along with distorted screaming, crackling, eerie machine sounds, drones, disorder, devastation and turmoil taking over the place. All this is often manipulated, expanded or reduced, twisted in one way or another, as if looking at things through those weird distortion mirrors one can find in horror shows or circuses. Or through a magnifying glass, or simply through an altered consciousness state. As if you were caught in a spaceship somewhere far, far away from your galaxy, in unknown territory, and suddenly found yourself in the middle of a battle between ancient races. Various species, different voices, different situations, moments in time. There are phases when everything falls apart, and all you can hear is the sound of things blowing up, shooting at each other, people screaming, a giant human supernova devouring itself in the war of all wars… Each soldier preoccupied with his/her part in the grand scheme, various voice samples adding to the general pounding. Then it all settles down, and there is only the aftermath of chain reactions, a reminder of what had previously taken place. The silence lasts for quite a while, and then distorted voices start to appear again, and the battle is renewed – more restless forces, more blasts, more chaos. That pretty much goes on until the end of the first track, alternating one state for the other.

Track two is more aggressive and loud, it begins with repeated noise configurations and then moves on to static, sirens, whistling and screeching, artificial bird squeaking, and the echoing of indefinable appliances, continuously oscillating between ambient and industrial noise. The human element doesn't occur here, as there are no voice samples to even resemble human speech, those that are there are so heavily distorted they can only be the utterance of a powerful, evil, ineffably old and inconceivably intricate mechanism. For those metaphysically inclined, it could even be the voice of some primordial being. In about the middle the uproar diminishes, and it reaches its end with various ambient sounds.

A comment on war, its origins, its necessity, its roots and nature – the ever-present impulse and instinct for self-preservation, survival, control and power. And the lengths everyone goes to in order to achieve dominance. Perhaps even an allusion, to what may lie ahead in our very distant future. Musically speaking it is an assortment of frenzied noise and environment resonances, only the environment it refers to isn't a totally human one. Machines have the first word here, and all kinds of unidentifiable sounds, by unidentifiable objects or creatures. Humans do exist however, voice samples from a selection of films exist to give the note of panic, disorientation, exertion and entanglement in an ongoing state of conflict.

It’s not easy listening, it’s not, typically speaking, background soundscapes, as it pierces through the mind and persistently requires the listener’s participation and recruitment of imaginative powers, it’s not the type of music you play when your parents or your trendy girlfriend/boyfriend are around, it’s not even the type of music the average rhythmic noise enthusiast will easily appreciate, as there is no consistent rhythmic pattern in it. All these are good things in my book. Familiarity with war, war films, sci-fi films and the likes will certainly come in handy when listening to this. So far so good, my only objection is that it could have been shorter in length, the tracks are too long and tend to repeat themselves in some points.