With a line-up including cEvin Key, Ken ‘hiwatt’ Marshall and Traz Damji I figured this, at the very least, would be a class act but also probably a bit of a nightmare to figure out how to turn in an informative review. And so it is on both counts.
What is it? We’ll, distilled down this could be seen as 31 electronic vignettes, 31 scenes from an unmade horror film. Short passages, mostly around the two minute mark, designed to summon a sense of deep unease, but also set a scene within an imaginary framework. With no actual story this might suggest a truly fractured and bitty album, a smashed pane of glass with precious little to connect the tiny pieces. However that does not factor in the sheet level of talent of these guys. Not at all.
From this unlikely premise, what we actually enter is a dark, unsettling and entirely coherent soundspace where there is a genuine sense of exploration, of movement within unquiet buildings where either someone or some presence at turns stalks and hides from you. I suspect every listener will take away their own sense of place and even their own frames of reference depending on their own fears, a unique sense of foreboding for everyone who enters here. For my own darkness I get flickers of Lustmord’s seminal trapped He’ll of ‘Heresy’ but devoid of any sense of that huge Leviathan nature and instead close and very personal; the inescapable stalking of Goblin but without the knife actually descending; an electronic, far less genteel cousin to The Parlour Trick’s ‘A Blessed Unrest’. The sense of exploration here conjures the impossible and inexplicably horrific world of Mark Z. Danielewski’s ‘House Of Leaves ‘ novel and a half slide against Mariano Baino’s Lovecraftian film ‘Dark Waters’ where corridors and tunnels can lead to dark, otherworldly awe and horror, or the sudden end at the point of a kitchen knife from the shadows.
It is a surprisingly rhythmic album as a whole. Crescendos are used sparingly and are therefore all the more violent in appearance, sudden stops equally not as prevalent as 31 tracks might suggest. Despite its outward suggestion this is the very definition of a coherent and malevolent approach. After only a couple of plays, passages were lodging in my psyche and hollowing out spaces to nestle. It seeps into your soul, mostly quietly but never softly, and perversely offers a place for you to dwell within it.
Dark, flowing, beautifully evocative it is actually one of the finest pieces of dark ambient, soundtrack style music I have heard. With the names involved I expected it to be good. Just not quite this good. Malignant; it grows, it blossoms and it expands to fill those abyssal places we all keep.
Truly a taker of breath.
(9/10 Gizmo)
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