Review Summary: The sonic equivalent of vivisection.
The trial of the members of Japanese Unit 731 in Khabarovsk took place in 1949. The court finds 12 soldiers guilty of developing biological weapons and experimenting on humans - or «timbers,» as they called them. Unit 731 measured the limits of human resistance to mutilation, encapsulating in hours, minutes, and seconds the soldiers’ survival potential depending on their injuries. In order not to distort the results of the research, scientists cut people alive. Besides amputations, they have practiced vivisection: starting from the peritoneum, they have extracted organs from the still alive victim.
A new album from the Japanese band Anatomia is the sonic equivalent of vivisection. Corporeal Torment is designed as a sequential organ extraction. The first track, Dismemberment, begins with a fierce but brief fight; first, blastbeats chain the victim to the operating table, then the viscous death-doom opens up his peritoneum.
When the subject stops resisting, Slime of Putrescence begins organ harvesting. The vocals on this track sound like a rattle of tearing guts, the instruments slowly chopping off the flesh. Anatomia observes the victim’s agony but doesn’t allow him to die fast. Corporeal Torment isn’t about fast at all: here is much more doom than death.
On the slow and depressing Despaired Void, the victim submits with the process: the brain refuses to believe in the very possibility of such monstrous pain. Indifference replaces agony. Guitars give way to keys. The torturer’s voice barely breaks through the veil of delirium by a strained dirge: the words are stretched out, floating from somewhere far away.
The last track Mortem is a 20-minute posthumous hallucination. The texture of the drone-doom, festering with samples, is wrapped in dark ambient. The music dies out, dissolves into noise improvisation. The extracted brain digests itself until it falls into the abyss of nothingness.
Anatomia records the time: 41 minutes 44 seconds. The subject is dead.
