Review Summary: The mission here is simple: Get a ouija board into the hands of every child in The United States.
As their past projects show, Hiro Kone (aka Nicky Mao) and Drew McDowall sift their way through genres for the sake of sonic exploration. Whereas Mao’s musicianship in Effi Briest and Up Died Sound exemplifies an inquisitive take on indie and postrock structures, McDowall’s formative years in postpunk and industrial (The Poems, Psychic TV, and Coil) show a knack for experimental collaboration (see also Compound Eye).
Both artists play with the structures of life and death on the macrolevel. Hiro Kone’s Love is the Capital (2017) — awash with ambient synths, eclectic samples, kinetic drums — captures the current zeitgeist of our planet's ecological horror. Similarly, Drew McDowall’s modular synthesis on Unnatural Channel (2017) defamiliarizes the biological by having it turn parasitic. But on The Ghost of George Bataille, they choose a more existential approach that also dabbles in the occult.
Mao mentions in an interview how the record's title was inspired by a friend who, after contacting Bataille via a Ouija board, had to end the session abruptly due to the spirit’s increasing hostility. While the attempt to solicit help from the dead proved fruitless — the friend had reached out to Bataille for names to her untitled art pieces — the story stuck with Mao and McDowall. Yet the album’s title was chosen for philosophical reasons as well. Sharing an affinity with Bataille’s work, Mao says transgression and taboo are useful for moving beyond the realm of language, particularly in the face of death, and toward an encounter with the unknown: “Death lights the world, but there’s nothing one can say for certain about it. It is a productive negativity, a driving force.” If death is the impetus behind life and the creation of art, then Drew McDowall and Hiro Kone’s séance summons spirits that cannot be understood rationally or even consciously. Their music dethrones our ability to speak coherently, rendering storytelling not useless but irrational. What’s left are unconscious narratives, which are ghost stories of a particular kind: rather than inflicting past trauma upon the living, they shock the listener in the present by undermining logic’s ability to tell stories about what is real.
Recorded in a small shed in Palenville, New York -- the land was at different times used as an artist colony and a Catholic boy camp -- the record serves as the threshold between late summer’s heat and the growing darkness of early fall. At 25 minutes, the four tracks offer contradicting, unconscious images that nevertheless form a composite narrative-machine.
“Barely Awake” starts the record off with a mirage of dry, metallic strings that unexpectedly changes. Like a dried-out contact lens that scratches at the cornea, the track’s first moments evoke a desert of pain before jumpcutting to reverberating synths. By and large, the insidious and zombie-like motion evokes the workday repetition of a factory. Another image comes from the sense of sleep deprivation that is amplified by the midafternoon sun and its unrelenting glare. Condemned to habitual, Sisyphean motion, the listener starts off somewhere akin to daylight's purgatory.
If “Barely Awake” is the dread of the workday, then the surreal “Dreaming Is Nursed In Darkness” is the moment where insomnia comes alive at night. Here the escalating industrial glitches, bottom-feeder synths, and deft samples all flicker twilight. The end result is something melodically alien, an effect nearing the sounds of Darkside’s Psychic or a deep-sea journey wherein we catch a glimpse of some Cthuluesque creature.
Starting the second half of the record sparse and percussion-focused, “Bright Kiss Of Fire” is the EKG of a conflagrated forest — think Paradise, California — as it exhales plumes of foreboding smoke. The mood here is contemplative and, if there a sense of tranquility on the record, it is amid these monstrous echoes and steady crackles of decay. “Violence’s Detour” serves as the kinetic center of the record. With its emphasis on melody, the evolving synths create a ravaging buildup. Spliced vocals continue to add weight alongside bass drums and layers of samples that cut at the track’s growth, creating a countermelody. Close to nine minutes, the track repeats the motifs found elsewhere. It also speaks of an end of sorts. But while the phantasmal sounds of The Ghost of George Bataille inevitably dance around moments of pain, loss and hopelessness, listening to the record as a whole emphasizes the promise of repetition's rearranging abilities to find life even amid the horizon of narrative's — and even one's own — death.