Genre: Industrial / Drone / Noise

Track Listing:

01 Floor
02 Fissioned
03 Pancome
04 Dissiminate
05 Orcvent
06 Theodolite
07 Morgon
08 Grim Coast


Too often we hear about the term “hypnotic” while it lapses a certain musical decantation. Some genres are more susceptible to suffer this cataloguing, or at least this association, mind you: Industrial and Ambient generally. Nevertheless more than one from these examples presented in many bands serves a shallow association; hypnotic states are taken frequently in, just for the sake of dulling the listener, to submit him into an empty trance that leads no traces in memory about the music whatsoever. A shallow implant that recurrently induces sleep and a typical boredom and remains next to the irremediable ejection of the cd out of the player and into the case, forever buried in oblivion. Music should prevail amidst its effects, as art itself it should give supreme importance to the memory it does construct on the listener and the legitimacy that it does guarantee with its aesthetic.

Skinwell is a surprising example of this aspect. Industrial having a meeting with Drone Ambient and leaving a hypnotic halo behind it, just like a spectre. A strange apparition indeed, in these days where so many have succumbed into the easy path of repeating other’s people work or have fallen in the common grounds that define the orthodoxy from a genre. “Tunnels”, first album issued by the Canadian duo conformed by Martin Dumais and Christian Corvellec refuses to categorize their work as their music is certainly different in many aspects, first because its form differs from the great majority of Industrial/Dark ambient ensembles, clearly defining a personality and a sound of their own and second because their content certainly remains uncategorizable in its own terms, only allowing us to perceive the shape of an industrial background that could remit us to the old school noise and a marginal factory ambience while their structures allow space on certain post rock sonority that leads to a concrete amplitude in terms of sonority. Spacious, nebulous, industrialized and ultimately charged with a power that submits into a perfidious trance.

Now imagine the dense guitar power chord performed by mid period Swans empowered by amplification and brutally layered in a continuous mass of stellar gas revolted with the harsh sound logic from machinery recorded from factories and engines serving the role of a strange rhythmic base, reminiscences from the noise efficiency that was familiar with Throbbing gristle and the immediacy with a machine like logic close to SPK explorations comes to mind also. The relentless guitar buzzing erupting from the speakers sounds as the vibration from a huge electric power plant, acquiring different tonalities and textures, continuously morphing its shape in an reverberating madness overdrive that ultimately sparks static energy over the listener’s mind.

Main instrument is put at the service of atmospheric noise and ambient textures; the guitar input is distorted to the point of disfiguration by creating a colossal barrier of drone layers that share a dual tonality, conforming a continuous buzz of high and low pitched drones reverberating immensely, creating a whole world of sound alien to its own, an atmosphere that is both intimidating and ecstatic, contradictorily stony and gassy structurally speaking. Its absorbing sonority induces strange landscapes, ranging from ever working machinery like forms to space like travels and dimensional mind trips. Rhythmic section is established by the murmur of the drone, rambling incessantly and defining a perceptible pulsation that ultimately conforms the rhythm, other times the background crowded with machine rumours and systematic clanging takes prevalence.

This is very intriguing music, not quite derived from the realization of its contents which are ominous and extremely powerful but for the images and landscapes it does summon. Rather simple in concept, the music presents an over eloquent insight that captivates with inductive mesmerism, a trance that results of an unfathomed deepness and more extravagant aural exploration.

Skinwell will not leave it there, I’m sure they will come back with more after “Tunnels” and presuming the future quality their works will have in comparison with the one we had here it will be as intriguing, intensely hypnotic and captivating as this experiment was. Skinwell acknowledged the aural essence from hypnosis and with its visionary industrial music they have created a sound of their own and truly an aural trance in the true meaning of the word. We will be waiting for their comeback.