Portal To Future Ruins

German noise manipulator Baldruin (AKA Johannes Schebler) manages to create tense, terse, monochrome dystopias by the flick of a switch, the lick of white noise, the stutter of a tapped snare. So the title of his latest release Portal makes a lot of sense - a suite of otherworldly soundscapes that feels both futuristic and primordial, feral and pristine. Even the naturalistic sound of splashing water, an effect that permeates many lo-fi experimental outliers, comes through on an subdued operatic piece ironically called 'Deus Ex Machina'. The sonic mirror that Schelber holds up in Portal never reflects the expected - landscapes are refracted, vistas are distorted, hallucinations waver in and out of clarity, focus and a rooted reality. The lyrics from 'No Escape' come from the poem Night Shift by Sylvia Plath, an artist who made perverse and torn emotion from brutal, provocative imagery. Portal is a fidgety, ethereal gate to distorted parallels - come along for the ride.

Pick a clear vinyl version of Portal here.

A Silent Drop In Holo Time

Let's drone out into the twilight with this new collaboration from Holodeck Records. From Ashes Comes The Day is a two-part behemoth crafted out of enmeshed workmanship by two consummate experimentalists - Drophead (AKA Montreal's Eric Craven) and Silent Land Time Machine (AKA Austin's Jonathan Slade). The seesawing drone narrative that exists here resonates primarily due to the strings that Slade incorporates, at once imitating a siren, a circular saw, a taut wire fence vibrating in a desert storm. The pregnant electrical maelstrom that comes over the horizon - guitar, effects, ephemeral noise - fills in the gaps and isolates; a seamless intersection that nevertheless evokes natural ostracism. Some of the reverberation reminds me of Neil Young's Dead Man score, if created as a backdrop for a dystopian tundra, the sun scorched an iridescent red. The cyclical nature of these two tracks also plays its part - it feels like a soundtrack to the post-apocalyptic ages, one destined to be passed down generation to generation as their livelihoods and likelihood to hold onto their humanity diminishes exponentially.

The thing about From Ashes Come The Day though is that I find this somehow prophetic, ebullient even. The interwoven guitar-and-viola feedback licks at the soul - a double-helix of like minds, creating a nebulous landscape that seeps from the cracks of a destroyed future, yet its mere existence is proof that the future is still worth fighting for.

Buy the LP here.

Dissolving Constructed Symbols Online

This one has been a long time coming too – again, written into the hitherto unfinished fourth instalment of Everybody’s Droning On The Weekend, but seeing as Ill be seeing Christopher Royal King in his “day band” mode tonight as This Will Destroy You play London’s Scala, it’s high time this gets its airtime. Excellently intriguing label Holodeck Records put out Online Architecture earlier this year. The unpacking process has meant I have stumbled over “lost” albums – this is one of them. King’s electronic project Symbol focuses primarily on tape erasure and looped manipulations, a transmogrification from epochal sound systems to a more amorphous entity, evoking the stillness of euphoria and the devastation of a world irrevocably changed – a post-apocalyptic ecstasy where the human limit for emotional capacity is reached and overrun, and all that is left is to sit in the tranquillity of the End and marvel at its wondrous completeness. For Online Architecture is all about finding traction in decay – something that seminal Basinski tract The Disintegration Loops manifested – as King creates pieces using instruments (such as guitar, dulcimer and harmonium) that he systematically frays by processing through a myriad of modular patch-bays and therefore patchworking new, chimeric soundscapes. Some of the tape reels that these songs were recorded to were specifically chosen due to their disintegration levels, thus giving a warm, fragile and tenebrous filter (a couple disintegrated entirely during the final transfer). It’s a stunning contemplation of Man on the precipice of its own devising (much of Online Architecture comes from King’s travails through China and his growing horror and sense of dissipating Self as he witnessed first-hand the country’s yet-to-be-inhabited ghost cities and the overflowing mega-metropolises). Seriously – I cannot think of ‘Lineage’, the album’s closer, without Malick-esque pastiche images of crystalline humanism swell around me, often of men falling from buildings whilst the sun shone through the smallest gaps that the buildings allowed, as if the building could hold no more. It’s a haunting and evocative piece that swells to the point of spiritual implosion, yet also holds a great degree of dexterity and light within its machinations. It’s a fantastic suite of ambient permutations and I'm glad I finally fell into its embrace.

You can purchase Online Architecture here – and if you are a fan of this sort of thing, this is essential.

Trolling A Good Holodeck House

Not one but two reissues from Austin, Texas' Holodeck are helping me get outta the fugue state I'm in after the excellent Sonic Masala show last night (thanks for coming along and supporting guys!). First up is Untitled, an LP of six untitled intricate drone machinations from trio Good Stuff House, featuring members of the excellent Kwaidan and Zelienople. It wavers between Western acoustic apocalypse, dystopian desolation and despair, and the haunting echos of a ghost town, all set to a gentle hum and ghostly murmur. Wind chimes and the echoes of a closing door in 'Untitled #2' are equally entrancing and perturbing, like an abandoned and dilapidated building smothered in sunlight, doors missing, cavernous darkness within.It disintegrates and regenerates, the acoustic guitar a forgotten echo of a pastoral farmer plucking before the sun died. Dark, evocative, excellent.

Then there is the self-titled Troller record. I have actually had a hold of this since February, and haven't found the right time to talk about it - until now. The goth drone trancers have carved out something so insidious and devious that it is difficult to succumb, because if you do you aren't waking from this nightmare. The cover alone makes this an impulse buy - seriously, look at it! - but the content is no laughing matter; this is the score to a bad trip, a lysergic fall down endless stairwells, a fever dream of ultra gloss, red neon windows and zero gravity, an aural Giallo for the space age. Seductively disturbing.


You can grab these albums here. My pick is Good Stuff House, but only because I'm scared what Troller is doing to me - long live the flesh.