Genre: Experimental / Noise / Ambient
Tracklist:
01 Closed
02 Strange Signs
03 The Moment of Fear
04 Mind Game
05 Your Daily Dose
06 Opened
07 Omnipotent
I can imagine that it must be difficult for a musician (ANY musician in fact) to try to wrest something original from their chosen area of the musical universe. This is especially true of the little corner called NOISE – to most people it is just simply that, and for the most part it is, but just occasionally along comes a more ‘sensitive’ artist who has the capacity to look beyond superficial definitions and mundane perceptions, and bring out the beauty inherent (or more properly hidden) in noise. One such artist is the man behind the present recording under review, RJ Schrey, and “The 7 Hidden Chapters” should open anyone’s eyes to the sheer poetry that hides in the interstices of noise.
The brand of noise on show here is of a particular flavour – it’s broadly painted in a sweepingly cinematic style, and illustrative of dark corridors and creepy houses, also of vast desolate landscapes scoured clean by biting winds, both nature- and nuclear-spawned. Here we have the anticipated murderous action that never quite comes, or the ghostly unseen presence in the deepest recesses of the abandoned house and mind, or the festering malignancy that lurks behind the facades of the everyday. This is moral decay and physical putrefaction made tangible, yet for all that, it has a purity and honesty which somehow makes it a startling sight to behold, one which attracts rather than repels. The shine on stinking liquid flesh beams out and beguiles us, fascinating us as well as simultaneously making our gorge rise in disgust. We want to run away, in fact our fight or flight reflex demands that we do, yet there is that in its decay that beckons to us, as if to say ‘look beyond mere appearances, there is beauty even here’...
And that essentially is the crux of Schrey’s art – that while superficially there is a sense of darkness and that decay that’s been pointed out, he has managed to portray it through a lens which lovingly caresses it and shows us that all is not as our senses would tell us. ‘Closed’ raises the hackles on the back of the neck, ringing tones and hurricane granularity combining to grip the heart in a stiflingly claustrophobic cloak of malice – but the fear brought to us is a delicious one, a frisson of precarious delight playing with our spines. ‘The Moment of Fear’ is the sound of psyches fracturing and shattering, like icicles splintering under pressure, and the echoes of breakdown reverberating around deep canyons of the subconscious. Desolation is the keyword here, but it’s of a species that reminds one of the stretches of the ice-bound desert north and south of us. It’s cold, it’s barren and it’s out of reach, but yet it has a sculptural beauty that transcends those negatives. Yes, it’s dangerous here, but there is still no denying the spectacular vistas that sweep away from us.
‘Opened’ is the complement to the opening track – the claustrophobia replaced by limitless, even if bitterly cold, expansiveness. The blizzard is freezing to the very core, yet contradictorily one feels that one could walk and walk and never find the edges or boundaries. Here is both physical and mental emptiness, an emptiness that frightens one with its sheer starkness and limitlessness once we are made aware of it, instilling a frigid agoraphobia deep into the very soul. The enormity of that expanse is enough to shatter the soul, crystalline shards glinting in harsh unfiltered sunlight on snow carpeting ages-old ice.
‘The 7 Hidden Chapters’ is at once a terrifyingly vertiginous assault on the senses and a mesmerising panorama, a secret world where we can marvel at stunning landscapes, both real and imagined, and doing so while we are in the very act of dying. It is at once enticing us and devouring us. It is enchanting us even as it ensnares us. It is both exhilarating and frightening. It wants to send us on an exciting journey while at the same scaring the bejesus out of us... deliciously perverse in a good way.
