Review Summary: ♬ useless data bores the masses ♬
Some moments on Nocturnerror’s mini-album,
Last Seconds of Resentment Required, demonstrate what might be a first in comparable music - or, at least, a severely under-utilized tactic. Not the only artist to condense musical epics into shorter runtimes, Italy’s Carmine Laurenza, aka Nocturnerror, takes a more demented route, compacting musical bouts of psychosis into dense melodramas. Pieces which could easily be ten-minute long detours with several acts, distinct sense of place and traversal, instead feel like several layers of consciousness. The movement feels more surreal than actual, as though you’re confined to an operating table, and everything else out of body moves in blurred fast-motion.
Stylistically, Nocturnerror thankfully avoids the timeworn tropes of most modern dark ambient (most of which lately requires cinematic powers of suggestion to project more into an album than what is in actuality there: likening the music to a horror film is the common route), and instead veers more into deconstructed club ideals and post industrial tics. It’s all arranged in such a way that it’s tough to be allegorical, really, as I’m not sure what sounds like this, embodied. Opener “Blue Circle” pulses with mechanized Gregorian hums, and scattering critters (assuming they’re alive) that do little to truly disturb, aside from being underfoot. Paired with the gasping and fantastical setting, and I can’t help but recall the soot sprites, or susuwatari, from
Spirited Away, and to some extent the spirit No-Face. This is as subtle as it gets for want of inference, though, as things only get busier. Songs like “Fake Useless Dialogues” and “No Radio Wave Transmission” succumb to grime and excess, with deep, rattling beats, chopped synths, grinding drones, and non-linear patterns.
It’s wise for the format of
Last Seconds of Resentment Required to be a concise one, reaching around twenty-five minutes or so, as the album can reach states of sensory overload; and a couple more subtle passages would have been necessary had Nocturnerror aimed for greater timelengths. Otherwise, the overlying monochromatic sound of the album might be more obvious and less exploitable: despite the dizzying array of tools used, much of the album seems to draw from a restricted colour palette. This isn’t necessarily damning, as it does help the spasmodic approach appear more focused, but it’s a risky and noticeable gambit. Penultimate track “Dust (Maybe)” is probably vital in elevating the album above such reproach, as it’s maybe the most human, tangible moment here. The thoughts are deliberate, melodies persist, and the song’s story arch is traceable to the album finale. It’s a necessary step back in an album that you wouldn’t trust to show such measured self-awareness.
As you continue listening to
Last Seconds of Resentment Required, it less and less resembles decadence or fun, moreso taking the form of resignation, like reaching a state of sleep paralysis in a discotheque. Nocturnerror achieves this as a rounded chronicle, while also constructing songs with compressed, interwoven narratives of their own, rendering him both a talented producer and an unsettling conceptual artist.
