Words by Sean Victory
Sean Victory is a lifelong artist, tinkerer, and musician. His current projects are Nightmare Frontier and World Hum, having also contributed to the groups Famished Ghosts, Future Toys, and Owl & Swan.
Inferno by Boards of Canada (Warp Records)
In listening to Inferno, I hear a continuation of the themes present on Boards of Canada’s last release, 2013’s Tomorrow’s Harvest. The electronics imbue their usual retro-futuristic sounds with an in-built sense of the failing-flourishing technologies. The darker edge of these machines often eclipse and contrast the ineffable fragility of the human predicament. This human presence on the album arrives in the form of sampled speech. Plucked from our ever-expanding archive, these samples combine with music in an attempt at delivering a PSA via telepathy. The voices reach out to us from the universal unconscious—fractured and vague, as if these samples were the only tools given to express that which language itself fails to significantly illuminate.
Read the album title; smell the air; have a look out the window in your palm. This is music for the end of days. The only bit of levity on this record is on the opening track “Introit”, serving as the micro-fanfare for information disseminated via public broadcast, the news to follow. Furthermore, there are so many mentions of God, apocalypse, sin, and the return of Christ. On “Age of Capricorn” the samples spell the name “Mabus” which is likely a reference to a moniker that Nostradamus gave to the Anti-Christ. “Mabus” repeats continually in the background even as another voice says, “I am worthy of your gift// You bore my sin// Help prepare me for your return.” The juxtaposition of these two conflicting samples combine to suggest that it is not Christ who this voice is praising, but instead has fallen under the sway of the great deceiver.
The track following this is “Father and Son,” another collision between faith and reality. “I love you, but I love the Lord. More than I love any physical being.” The sample and the track’s title once again provide a spare enough skeleton to allow curiosity to do some work. Is the father not able to love his son with the same surrender granted the Lord? Does the Father=God and the Son=Christ? Do these archetypes overlap in shared consonance? God forsakes Jesus on the Cross. The Father leaves the son at the mercy of the mortal world, reaching to the unknowable who will redeem him more than any other physical being.
Another facet to consider in the sample on this track: “…a man’s foes will be those of his own household.” Thematically, this jives with Christianity as the foremost cult of human sacrifice. The son (the future) must be sacrificed so that the father may live in the world as he wishes it was (the past). The prospect of the future dashed against the wish for was. Sacrificed for the nostalgia of an imaginary past, vague and mighty. Coveted and uninhabitable. The inevitable approaches with our eyes over our shoulders as we paddle against the current. Never onward, but again again.
It’s not hard to see America’s bruised hand reaching tremulously across this album. Indeed, Boards of Canada and Warp Records filed a cease and desist against the current administration for using the song “Deep Time” in its propaganda: a concrete bleakness of detention centers, the VHS-warbling reminiscence of America’s best days, a past within reach. What to make of this further echo upon our times? That a music written so seemingly against this exact collapse should be co-opted by the destructor in his endless pud-pulling.
On its own merits it is a fantastic record from start to finish. There’s plenty of Lynchian distortions at play as the narrative tumbles around you, lots of space to lose yourself. As per usual, the production is immaculate. Parts are layered with great consideration, the songs burst with sonic content, but each sound has its space. Whether it’s straining to hear a sample buried in the mix, or lost in the fluid rhythms of the songs, these opportunities swallow you unknowingly as you listen. Sound melts you into an adjacent space, held by the quiet warmth of your own doomed humanity in the ever-humming universe.
Paradessence by Visible Cloaks (RVNG Intl.)
Much like Autechre’s endless refining of aesthetics, Visible Cloaks move deeper into their own sound with each release. Edges have been trimmed, screws and nuts have been double checked, waste has been eliminated, and the whole apparatus receives a tidy little upgrade. Further incorporating myriad influences into compositions that always manage to sound more like them. On earlier releases, the group’s fondness for Japanese ambient music was most apparent. In growing they took the core aspects of that aesthetic and mixed it generously with the performers’ own idiosyncratic musical gestures and flourishes.
Album opener “Apsis” slowly wallpapers a setting in real time. Phasing saw waves roll out a landscape in a foreground-to-background crescendo. Bass stabs bless the hillsides with plants and little scavenging animals. A resonant shiver on a fading reverb describes the sky.
Then something odd happens. Tiny little corruptions can be heard running through these sounds, errant LFOs, melodies caving to a vibrato like an intoxicant crossing the blood brain barrier. After each note fades—silence holds the space letting the song breathe, the music blooms in return, but with bit-crushed polygons obscuring the canvas. From there, these aberrations spread wilder yet. Arpeggios climb and circle, filters and cycling envelopes strangle away our beautiful saw-wave hillsides. The plants and animals have rounded themselves up, and surrendered to the shredder. In a fun bit of sound design, these distortions appear in the aural foreground, carved like a scratch into a lens. Crackling with artifacts, these images seem to be dissolving behind your eyes [ears], where the rendering of the soundscape leans beyond the easel and into the audience. Further cranking this faucet behind the listener’s third ear, the wires cross even more, the song growing through error. The channels in interference with one another raise a minor din in their clashing. As the malfunction peaks, they resolve and drift like fog from view. After their vanishing is complete we realize: they’ve left our ears here in a stream.
Words so frequently fail when it comes to Paradessence. The music is a sound world more than it is a song, and yet it keeps one finger non-committally, gingerly hooked to notions of song structure and melody. Again, like Autechre, the focal point of the music is so much about inferring a space where something more traditional would’ve been possible. Example: Gating a reverb so hard it sounds seasick instead of opting to include the melodic element that is operating the gate.
It’s a type of deliberate omission that may overcomplicate execution by the artist, but it calls to the listener from an unfamiliar place. A distant door closing down the hall you’ve just arrived in, or a lens flare prying open your mind’s eye. Their music is the experiential equivalent of an augmented reality application on a camera. The natural world is digitally reproduced in patterns and signals, given supplemental information, tweaked/corrupted, and presented as a digital facsimile of an analog world. Like the concert captured on a cellphone, the outer world was beyond the frame. It was traded for a compressed binary reproduction of a moment we decided to miss. Each time we remember we falsify the memory further. With small embellishments and omissions at the reins of an avalanche of easements driving down on this temporal monument in our mind, we are left clutching an invaluable talisman, faulty and riddled with fictions. So the songs captured here sound like a memory taking its ten-thousandth stroll around a beauteous moment. It is dusty and degraded, hollowed, greatly reduced, and as luminous as a star’s first breath.
Honorable Mentions
HEATHEN AXE by HEATHEN AXE (DEATHGOD CORP)
In search of the earth-shaking thunder of a basement jam? The breathless rush of sonic cobbling, sharp-edged, lost and free? Clobbered tapes magnetically bruised to perfection, baked until deep fried? I bought this record without hearing a lick of it, based entirely on the liner notes: “FOR FANS OF MAINLINER, HIGH RISE, COMETS ON FIRE, HAIR POLICE”. That’s good enough for me.
The ever-restless John Paul Dwyer continues to drop slabs like some sort of little windup-musical-machine guy. While Dwyer is usually more than busy with his main project, OSEES, he seems to have found the time to fully stock his Los Angeles HQ with the city’s kindred spirits. Between his constant touring with OSEES he still finds time to perform and release projects in formations such as Bent Arcana, Damaged Bug, Witch Egg, Posh Swat, RITUAL / HABIT / CEREMONY, that cool Les Rallizes Dénudés cover show he played in Chicago (that I missed!). JPD has stretched himself further out than ever before in his extensive music career.
In that way, HEATHEN AXE feels like Dwyer’s bong hit after a 12 hour shift. It’s three-beers loose, unconcerned by anything but catharsis. To be clear, this is not a sloppy display of half-cocked musicianship—the musicianship is the unshakable foundation! What translates to the recording is that there’s no more headroom left in this mixer, the volume knobs on the amps have been maxed out and then removed, the VU is taking a nap, buried on the red end of the meter, a pall of smoke hangs in the room as instruments smolder. This is the fuck-it-let’s-get-down-to-it mentality that keeps the songs subjected to the caterwauling whirlwind of blazing hot destruction while keeping everything rhythmically rooted. There’s always a backbone groove in the pocket, and plenty of crunchy digressions. The fuzz pedal is a star of the show on many of these songs, choking out little 8-bit sputters and spewing white hot loogies. It’s all crunch, crash, thump and sizzle.
Mentions (not without honor, just without text)
Now You Exist by The Field (Studio Barnhus)
Alignment by VSK (Mord Records)
The Kármán Line by The Outer Worlds Jazz Ensemble (ATA Records)
Library Copy Do Not Remove by Discovery Zone (RVNG Intl.)
bitknot by feeble little horse (Saddle Creek)
Disque 4 – ‘76 Studio Et Live by Les Rallizes Dénudés (Temporal Drift)
Setting by Setting (Thrill Jockey)
Sphere to Sphere by Zyggurat (Old Technology)