Genre:  Experimental/Noise/Ambient/Industrial

Track Listing:

01 Part I
02 Part II

This 43 minute experimental/ambient/noise journey is best described impressionistically. Built around waves of delay-heavy guitar, droning bass, industrialised percussion, and fragmentary piano, it forges deep into the shadows of the unconscious.

The journey begins in squalls of guitar, at first feeling like the kind of noise-ambient we’ve all heard countless time before. Yet somehow the intensity builds and builds, the music gathering like a violent thunderstorm, looming menacingly. We begin to be swept up and it is as though, psychically speaking, the husk of one’s surface identity is slowly being stripped by the raw, raucous sounds.

This almost sickening sensation deepens and dwells before pouring into clattering, mechanistic percussion loops, which carry us perhaps to the halfway mark of the album (which sprawls across two 20-odd minute tracks). “Welcome to the Machine,” one is tempted to think, though this is far darker and more brutal than the Floyd.

Tuneless, shapeless, we are harried down the crushing conveyer-belt of consensus reality, our true nature shattered, moulded, pounded, stamped, smelted, battered, burnished. The brute cruelty of the music evokes to me the conveyer belt factories of Brave New World, stamping out template-shaped citizens that fit right in without any trouble.

Ahh, the deep dystopia this music evokes! Deep and deeper it crawls under the skin, bringing nausea and bewilderment. Finally the industrialised waves shatter over a beach of sorts, and we are left in the aftermath, our spirits traumatised by the unfeeling machine.

As the arrangements morph and warp, evoking back mists and shadowy clouds, a stuttering, stumbling piano figure comes to the fore. Its hesitant, repetitive pattern, tentative and wounded, gives the impression of a dove with a broken wing, on the cusp of despairing in the face of the grim fact of its impending demise. Or perhaps a seagull, covered in petrol from an oil slick, every attempt to free itself miring it deeper into its black, sticky death.

And so we fumble, raw in the vulnerability that this music evokes, its rough timbres and measured ruthlessness pressing salt deep into our wounds. We are stripped of form, reduced to reflex and flesh, reduced to tears and blood and weary flesh.

In this place we are finally abandoned, the music ending abruptly. One can imagine the piano sitting still now in some burnt out industrial complex, its weary murmurs finally chilled into death.

This is some of the most powerful experimental/noise/industrial/ambient/whatever music I have ever encountered. Just when it seems like the experimental milieu is dominated by pointless masturbation, along comes a release like this and blows open the boundaries all over again. A masterpiece...but please, don’t ask me how to pronounce this outfit’s bizarre name!