Review Summary: “...I feel human heaviness.”
There’s a thematic sensuality running through this record, alluded to by the cover art and a connection to a particular 1976 film about sex and death. Similarly, there’s a softness - if not necessarily with a tender intention - within the showcased sound. This noise is light but not tentative. Ruffled but not wavery. These are immediate observations.
However, this is a noise wall (calling it ‘harsh’ could imply a level of brutishness that I just don’t see here) and so there’s no need to shoehorn in a overview of non-immediate progression or narrative either. This is just a moment, captured in amber and preserved (for fifty minutes). The finely-grained flickering sound is arranged into a monolith - though even so, it’s still not overbearing. There do appear to be slight variations in sound (though not to the extent that would subvert a wall’s inherent lack of dynamism) over the course of the record. It’d be easy to skip through and catalogue the small differences but enjoyment might instead come from listening to the whole and allowing the little details to creep to the surface. For instance, the listener might slowly become aware of a layer of discernable clicking or whirring within the noise. At certain points the noise might strike the listener as being more mechanical, like some buzzing device mapping unseen depths, at others perhaps more silky - if no less synthetic - possibly like the tearing of nylon fabric.
If that all sounds like a lot of projection and very, very subjective then well, yeah. It’s a part of investing in something so minimal (despite the accumulated mass) where there isn’t a wealth of ‘things’ to wax lyrical about or artist-employed mechanisms to latch onto. Despite that lack, there’s something immaterial about this record that I think I’ve become infatuated with.
