Genre: Harsh Noise / Power Electronics

01 Maggots on My Cock
02 Serenity in the Shadow of the Sword
03 Uhateu
04 Muselmann
05 Calculating God
06 Growing Groin
07 Needles in the Sperm Canal
08 First Time with a Corpse
09 When the Dog Bites... When the Bee Stings

There are some people in this world who somehow manage to distil the essence of their anger, or whatever emotion, into sound, and do it in a way that leaves no shadow of a doubt in the mind on the part of the listener. The Israeli noisician Michael Zolotov is one such, and through his one-man noise project Kadaver, he offers us a ride through his hate-filled dystopian world. He also seems to be filled up with a LOT of anger, since he seems to be pretty prolific in churning out the sounds of mass destruction and unleashing them on a deserving world.

As angry as he is, though, it has to be emphasised that there is yet a kind of literacy about his work, and that it’s not just about battering people’s ears and senses with the harshest noise possible. As with any kind of protest, it is often the most eloquently articulated statement that makes the biggest impact rather than the most violent confrontation. Zolotov doesn’t create blistering aural assaults just for the sake of being loud or merely abrasive; he has something to say and he says it rather well.

Okay, so there are the occasional forays into ear-shredding sonic territory, such as track seven “Needle in the Sperm Canal”, which is appropriately composed of shrieking and anguished screaming, as any man having undergone such treatment could testify, but even here Zolotov has aimed to invest it with a sense of having given it much thought in order to encapsulate the pain and suffering in the best possible way. The same can be said of “Serenity in the Shadow of the Sword” too, however, even here I would venture to posit that the nature of the noise employed is akin to a form of tool used for centring the mind. In other words it possesses a meditative quality, the equilibrium only being disturbed occasionally by the incursion of outside distractions. The piece ends with a sense of dissolution, as if final acceptance, leading to that serenity, has been achieved.

However, at the other end of the scale, are the pieces that speak of a more studied approach to noise. For instance, the album opener “Maggots on my Cock”, for all the superficial puerility of the title, displays layers and layers of sound that subtly interact with each other and brings a looping poetry to the searing and piercing circular sheets of noise. The layers duck and dive under and over the other, creating a complexly chaotic maelstrom that is at the same time a richly textured sonic field. Similarly the album closer ‘When the Dog Bites... When the Bee Stings’, apart from sounding like something that would scare the living shit out of Julie Andrews, also sounds like something that Frank Rothkamm would conjure up were he creating noise instead of experimental blips and bleeps. Although one can argue that all of Kadaver’s music is essentially a solid mass of abstraction, this particular track exhibits a more deliberate species of abstraction, composed as it is of shattered notes hurriedly chasing after and circling each other randomly, gradually subsiding into a distracted female voice singing over the breathing of some vast artificial leviathan.

Kadaver has taught me one thing, above all else (along with Mystified I might add): that noise can have a poetic voice all of its own. The true creativity here is the one where the musician has essentially taken a medium where most musicians just blast out incoherent blankets of unadulterated and undifferentiated noise, and instead has carved something uniquely different out of it. Zolotov coaxes, caresses and molests his sounds into form, the end result being an eloquent statement of his feelings towards the world in which we live, the fact that we seem to be a self-cursed species that has lost all sense of hope, and that we are inevitably, at some stage, going to self-destruct. Kadaver will probably be commissioned to provide the soundtrack to our demise, and will be gleefully playing while the world burns.