Review Summary: Desolation
The cry of someone lost in the wilderness, the abandonment of the self to grief, the devastating silence of the aftermath of a nuclear blast. This is the language which Ramleh is speaking on Hole in the Heart, an almost total despair written in an arid cloud of gray murk.
At this stage in their development, Ramleh had begun to slough off all the relentless confrontation of power electronics, the shrouding of the self in deviant sexuality and depravity that made a teleology out of causing the flesh to crawl. After the dissolution of Ramleh’s earlier iteration, Gary Mundy continued as a solo act, inspired by the death of poet, author and playwright Jean Genet to create this tribute, only 25 minutes in length in its original form and expanded to over 90 minutes for its 2009 rerelease.
The desolate atmosphere, more emotive than anything else industrial music was doing at the time, represents a deeper plunge into something approaching real heart than all the deviant posturing and violent eruption of the power electronics scene at the time. Mundy, howling like a wounded animal over a suffocating soundscape of droning synthesizer smothered in fuzz and drone, is the tragic human element in this ash-dusted aftermath, his voice conveying a total isolation, stark and cold, buried in the soul’s twilight. It’s all very harrowing, not an experience that batters the listener into submission, but rather one that settles over everything like an indelible dust, stifling and smothering all life and warmth.
Even on the much-expanded rerelease, Ramleh’s sonic palette does end up leaning to the narrow side, in spite of its originality. Mundy resorts to few elements beyond his screeching synthesizers, waves of quasi-noise, psychedelic guitar and droning howl, his strength as an artist found in how he arranges these elements for maximum effect rather than the sonic variety he pulls from them. The later expanded edition of album fleshes out the atmosphere of the original, diving even further from the conventions of power electronics and early death industrial into the suffocating murk of that desolate mood, expanding on the original to the point that the ’87 version feels almost like a trial run for the finished piece. The tracks that are added to the original four, which run from the noisy guitar drone of Spear Flowers to the pressed-to-death organ hymn of Grazing on Fear 2, are, for the most part drawn from various compilations and splits released by Broken Flag records over the decades since the album’s original release, but despite the variety and chronological distance of the various tracks from each other, there is a cohesiveness in sound and mood that fills out the original project and gives a sense of depth and individuality to the more genre-conforming original tracks.
So while the original version of the album may feel at least a bit incomplete, especially when the rerelease is the listener’s first exposure to Ramleh, as I’m sure it is for many, the expanded version may feel like a bit of a marathon, given the totally oppressive mood and length of the album. But with an atmosphere so effectively conveyed, regardless of any primitivity of sound or limitations of the sonic palette, one can’t help but to be swept away into this expansive desolation for as long as it can be endured. There’s very little in the way of life on this record, and nothing in the way of hope. But there can be something therapeutic in its total bleakness, a plunge into an ice bath that refreshes the rest of the world upon reemergence. Abandon hope, ye who enter, but it will still be waiting for you when you get back.
