(01.17.06) A dark ambient record which explores the bleak subterranean mysteries
of love, Kraken’s Amore is filled with echoes of unrequited
passion, the ghostly moans of spent ardor and the creak of
civilizations which have been destroyed by love. Spread across two
discs, Amore is a haunted record, filled with endless sorrow
and loneliness.
The first disc is broken into seven tracks and easily drifts between
them, elements surfacing time and again in a looping pattern that just
adds to the echoes of history which resonate through the disc. “Kamer
3:54″ opens with a sudden burst of street noise, a field recording
from the sidewalk of a busy metropolis. The sound of cars and voices
slurs into a mass of sound and is buried beneath an amorphous drone, a
subterranean groan which rises up from the cracked basements of the
buildings. Voices like the calls of muezzin at dusk compete with the
time-stretched notes of brass instruments as city life becomes a
ghostly whisper and a drone of phantasmal places.
“In De Regen Gaat Het Ook” is filled with spectral sounds: drones of
elongated french horns, the breathy gasp of gongs and distant
muttering of ghosts under water. After fourteen minutes of ambience,
we are suddenly thrust into a conversation at a sidewalk cafe,
eavesdropping from the next table. Are they talking about love?
(Well, it’s all in French and, uneducated American that I am, I can
catch one word in twelve.) Suddenly, in mid-conversation, we are
sucked back into the underground again where the pipes are steaming
and groaning, and the conversation from the cafe is but an echo heard
through miles of complicated duct work. “Verrand Van Rijovego” echoes
the sounds of “Kamer 3:54” but layers them beneath a film of intense
tones and gurgling aquatic noises. The sounds of traffic are now
filled with panic, cars honking their horns in terror and police
scanners rapidly spewing wordless noises of chaos. The sizzling white
noise covers everything and then drains away, returning us again to
the street-side cafe and the conversation.
Kraken makes interesting choices in their selection of field
recordings. While they return us again and again to the street and
the sounds of people and modern civilization, they also continually
bury us in deep dark places where the wind blows on ancient pipes like
it is sounding vast laments through old and bent horns. Drones of
sound — the groan of vanished civilizations which have been buried
beneath our continual progress — weep and cry against a rumbling
background of stone shifting and settling. In “In De Diepte Is Alles
Goed,” the tiny cries of children at play haunt the lengthy horn
notes, memories still held dear by the ghosts which move the ambient
wind through the dolorous instruments. In “Alles Wordt Wit,” the
voices are loops of sound, their edges being burred smooth by a
persistent sandstorm like the edges of old building made round by a
thousand years of wind.
The second disc is just two tracks, the hour long “Untitled 1” and the
one minute “Untitled 2.” “Untitled 1” continues the dark drone
ambience of the first disc while including bursts of scientific
discussion about the transmission of the AIDS virus, recited as if the
speakers were in a vast cavern. This is why we love no more, the
voices imply, preaching to a congregation which has lived underground
for a hundred generations. This is why we have taken to the dark
depths where we are safe from the bleak chaos of the surface. The
world is filled with the sound of distant rocks crumbling, of wind
sighing through neglected pipes and the creak of old machinery
settling. This is why we live in darkness, they say, down here we are
safe. The harpsichord of “Untitled 2” — reminiscent of the radiant
chamber music of the 18th century — seems to be either an ironic note
of finality to the despair and desolation of the previous hour of
oppressive ambience or a hint of possibility, a beam of sunlight which
finds its way down in the dark church of the sub-dwellers.
It’s a creepy record and certainly isn’t a love poem of wine and roses
and bedroom seduction. Kraken’s vision in Amore is desolate
and forsaken: either a warning of where isolation can take us; or a
vision of the futility of love against the backdrop of time’s immense
loop. Do we despair or do we take what light we have with us? It’s
hard to say, but Kraken makes my solitude tinged with apprehension.
This is dark ambience suited for mourning, spectral chamber music for
tombs and bottomless pits where light no longer falls. Make sure you
know the way back before descending with Amore.
Amore is out now on Spectre.
