Genre: Industrial
01: Zero
02: One
03: Two
04: Three
Kenji Siratori. For some he's a cutting edge cyber-punk author bringing a fresh voice to the ambient and industrial scenes. To others he's a self-promoting ingénue latching onto established music genres in order to steal their cultural impact. Whichever is the case, the tactic of apparently contacting any musician he could get an email address for certainly seems to have paid off in terms of sheer the number of split releases he's been involved with over the past year…
Death Creature, however, is entirely a solo EP and it shows. Consisting of four 10+ minute tracks of industrial soundscapes overlaid with heavily FXed Japanese vocals and, well, little else to be honest it's hard to describe this release as anything but "long". It starts off promising as the howling synth-void supports Kenji-san's eerie, panning voice…and then it barely changes. For fifty, tiresome minutes. Death Creature so wants to be the blackest, darkest noise available when, in fact, its total lack of emotional connection renders it little more than background noise. There's absolutely no threat to the music, the vocals seem to be the same uninflected rant on each track and the entire thing is shockingly boring (perhaps the worst crime of any music, specifically noise/soundscapes). You could, at a pinch, pass this off as exceptionally pretentious, experimental noise designed purely for the sake of existing and attempting to create a new experience…
If it hadn't all been done before, many years ago and far, far better. On first listen, Death Creature sounds uncannily like the out-takes from the soundtrack to the original Quake game; all otherworldly drones and shifting voices. Yet, where Reznor's work evokes deathly underhalls and lurking Shamblers Kenji-san's music quickly fades from the mind. The clinical rhythms are uninteresting and even the thin melodies scattered throughout the layers of noise are far too reminiscent of other works to have any lasting impact.
More than anything, this sounds like a noise record made by someone who's only heard of the concept of noise, someone who thinks that it sounds easy to throw together some layers of sound and call it a noise record. Yet, like anything that seems easy to outside, quality noise is something far more than mere layers of sounds. It has to have texture and emotion and impact…qualities that Death Creature, such a try-too-hard title, clearly lacks.
It's feels almost unprofessional to write a such negative review without outlining at least some positives that can be taken from the record but Death Creature strikes me as an irredeemably cynical release. The massive amounts of presumption that must have been employed to think that people wouldn't see through this bland and uninteresting rehash of half-understood ambient clichés is, frankly, staggering. Many superb artists struggle along by playing live shows and self-releasing their CDs so I find difficult to accept that someone can get their alleged music released simply by spamming MySpace and calling themselves a media manipulator. It's offensive, and not in a good way.
Buy something by Nordvargr or Navicon Torture Technologies and get something seriously unsettling, don't waste an hour listening to this.
