Music Re-View 12

 

All Images: Central & North-East Leicester, February 2022

[The muted harrumph of a throat being cleared/ cans being opened and drinks poured]/ I would not want to be in the story I am listening to/ it feels like a depiction of the slow understanding that one's idealized love is slowly ebbing away beneath the day-to-day destruction of reality/ no opening line or expository declaration materializes in its wake/ remember when you disinfected each plastic bag after grocery shopping?/ the result is addictive/ yet disconcerting for reasons unknown; a soft gliding mixture/ from subway to subway, divining the thoughts of the denizens of each building you pass/ you feel as if you are Bruno Ganz hovering from apartment to apartment, you pass/ recuperando un approccio documentaristico che racconta la dimensione urbana attraverso un collage di suoni/ the forgotten, undervalued individuals that inhabit the night/ foresee that, as all the signals collapse into noise, a sub-primordial chaos entity will arrive.

Mixtapes/ let's quickly talk about mixtapes/ from the first track, you can hear that once-roaring stream of consciousness slow to a trickle and freeze over/ the second you change the language to mixtape, nobody cares/ these are interstitial anthems, expressionistic and open-ended, delirious but deliberate, attuned to the drift and dreamstate of the current moment/ nach einem guten Jahr Pandemie bei Nachdenken uber die eigene Lage, bei dem Gewohntes neu in den Blick genommen und in Frage gestellt wird/ but wait, what exactly is a mixtape?/ it's human, but in a way that alienates rather than comforts, using processed, wounded-sounding samples to give the sense of journeying through an unfamiliar neighbourhood/ (we're talking instrumentals, songs, spoken word, field recordings, experimental sounds, skits)/ Blind Humpty Johnson has taught Channel Zero to anticipate an impending interruption of the global media system/ I fell for it and fell hard/ during the withering emotional turmoil of last year's uprisings against police brutality/ many found themselves asking: whatever happened to the artist that could make music feel like it was made just for me?

As the album progresses, concrete statements become more legible, and it becomes possible to delineate/ reverb-dunked guitar coming up against low scrapes of what sounds like cello and TV buzz/ the dubstep artist has gone silent/ electronic music, has become somehow infected by urban dwelling: beats are now part of our casual experience/ ogni brano ha un paessaggio timbrico interiore, sebbene il sound generale risulti organico nella sua dark ambience/ melodies glide by, carefully panning over a detailed landscape with a wide-angle lens/ they mostly resemble the progressive rock staple of the late 60s, where organs bridged an uneasy, at times even blasphemous, apocalyptic edge/ there are voices/ but they will only give you scraps from the banquet table/ they are too distorted and high-pitched to possibly be human. Empty corpses wandering the streets making very human noises: they sneeze, cough, inhale/ robots/ place you right at the edge of/ the production/ pushing the envelope another couple of inches/ into the places that you hesitate to go/ it feels as though you are really close up; like being in the same room, sharing the same headphones with the creator/ structure feels like/ a fishbone, rigged up to be kind of skitty, sharp.

Behind the concrete facades, there's a world of our own making/ the atmosphere is cold and eerie. The wind hitting the microphone sounds at times like an explosion far away.  There is a wavering sub-bass/ why shouldn't there be? The world has degraded to a dystopian shadow realm that's made it impossible to talk about the present without thinking of lost futures/ it's raining a lot/ as I write these lines/ it quickly becomes clear that something is not quite right in the story we are listening to/ the transhumanist dream of a stable Cyberpunk future, which seemed within arm's reach throughout the last decade, is now no more than a fractured desire/ it's somewhat of an occult idea, these parallel societies that create their own belief systems and ritualistic mythology/ nichts davon erscheint redundant/ we will inevitably look back at this time with grim memories about corrupt governments, tyranny and/ a genre-spanning collection of extraordinarily detailed interludes/ am Ende ist man auf diffuse Weise ergriffen.

It is a work for those already/ decommissioned and left to rot/ there's no one else making records like this/ it is better, it sounds real/ open your heart, and let it take you into the night/ it is unlikely that you will experience anything else quite like this for the rest of the year/ [water dripping and rain pouring... and something that could be knives or coins or something else metallic rubbing against each other].