Review Summary: Crossing the line between art and noise.
When it comes to music that pushes the boundaries between what we find comfortable and what teaches us, artists have to tread lightly. What point is it to their art if their style or message is so inaccessible that it gets lost on listeners? There's no better genre to exemplify this but in the "noise" or "drone" styles. Now I'm not knocking those who make this style in general. On the contrary, there are some superb artists to come out of them, such as Ash Ra Tempel, Tangerine Dream, Mauthausen Orchestra, Barst, or Boris. However, all these fellas know how to make their music interesting and accessible to those who come looking for it. This is not the case for Vanessa Collapsing.
Now, I have to give this enigmatic collective credit: the description of this album has a hell of a lot of potential. According to their Bandcamp page for their label Cerbera Odollam, "The Lower Field" is "A forced study of withdrawal. Nineteen minutes of punishing audial disorder from the low life." At first, I thought that sounded interesting--a soundtrack for drug abuse and depravity almost sounded enlightening! However, from the very get-go, it's unclear whether the group wanted to create sounds so punishing and inaccessible that we would want to immediately turn it off, or that they just left Garageband recording next to their TV. Because this album is just ***ing static.
There's a difference between having consistency in the sound and making an album that consists of the same song over and over. Yes, "The Lower Field" has different track lengths and intriguing titles to their songs. Hell, they even have different tones. But with very few exceptions, each "song" is a 14 second to three and a half minute droning exercise in static. To be fair, there are few tracks that provide some sort of interest: "Property" is relatively quieter and includes a distorted voice sample, "Alcoholic Father" and "Fall Far South" attempt to liven things up by including a jumpy electronic sort of glitch and dare I say tempo, and "Man is Hostile" features a disturbing 911 call sample of a woman tearfully describing her depraved life and living with a monster. However, given that this is a 19-minute album and the "good" tracks simply serve to provide respite from the rest of it, it serves to show something about the album as a whole--it's ridiculously unlistenable.
I can't help but think that its inaccessibility is the point, and to a point I get the intention here. And to be fair, picking one song to suffer through provides a jarring bass-heavy jolt of distortion that initially shocks and can be, um, tolerable for the brief runtime it provides. However, trying to listen to the whole 19 minutes of this static is nearly impossible. Now maybe I just don't "get it", and I do give Vanessa Collapsing a more generous score than I think it deserves because of its ambition, but I found myself thinking that 19 minutes of "The Lower Field" was 19 minutes too long for this kind of noise. And I don't take assigning this as "noise" lightly.
