Review Summary: spirit of trepidation
I’m not sure if saying
Quarter Turns Over A Living Line feels like peering into the maw of a (hopefully) dormant monster is entirely a fair claim. That’d be the overwhelmingly pungent initial response though; this thing looks and sounds like a dripping cave of morbid halitosis and there were numerous times during my first listens where I didn’t really want to sit around. The slightly eerie and sparse atmosphere doesn’t weigh down heavy. In stark contrast to the hulking monster I created in response, there is seldom anything close to foul available here to rear its head within the run time. I wanted to project something fleshy onto this. Something closer to organic than the creeping, industrial lullabies with their incongruous melodies and harsh twists. It isn’t a frightening endeavour. Not in the slightest. It is, however, just dreadful enough that inhibitions might manifest.
There was a break in the illusion. When “The Walker In Blast And Bottle” tore me from the belly of the beast with the ringing of an overly digitized bell chime, I think the devilry of the situation sunk in. Maybe as an inevitable byproduct of all Raime’s atmospheric occultisms, there wasn’t ever a focus on anything other than inciting something dark. And as if a bulb blew, I was back in the pit, staring at the same toothy hole but with some semblance of situational awareness. A distraction had somehow become a plunge deeper into the murk. The same troubled monotony, the same throb and growling. Auditory and cognitive dissonance would begin to merge this fixation on my gaping design with the
Quarter Turns Over A Living Line machine as I’d listen over and over again until it became nigh impossible to tell the two apart. And as a slight glimmer of something, anything, would begin to appear when “The Dimming Of Road And Rights” would bring this venture to a close, I’d be left grasping at air as it’d bleed out into obscurity. One step forward, two steps back. I have to struggle to remember a time when the closing hint of hope was anything more, or when this monster of mine and Raime’s machine weren’t so intimately connected.
