(04.10.05) Jason Coffman has been working as Anaphylaxis for over ten years,
cultivating a technique of noise collage that combines a love for
noisy drones, forgotten theme songs, radio signals, and the mechanical
chatter of industrial chaos. Noise for Lovers is a subtle
farrago of these aforementioned elements that drifts like a haunted
cloud across a bleak landscape. Opting to dwell in the atmospheric
rather than the ferociously noisy, Noise for Lovers is a record
suitable for close headphone listening. You succumb to the swirling
ambience of this record rather than have your brain scoured by its
explosive content.
“Hopeless” swirls about the listener, haunted by the looped memory of
Teresa Santoski’s vocals, and it is a mood that envelopes you
completely. It is a slowly turning whirlwind that combines the noisy
guitar textures of Loveliescrushing with the long tone ambience of
Stars of the Lid, building a storm of noise that revolves so slowly
that you can almost pick out each individual strand of static. Her
voice is heavily layered in “Tomorrow Romance,” creating a spectral
round of voices that float above watery drones like a shimmering
curtain of atmospheric effects.
There are beats to be found on Noise for Lovers, stuttering
hip-hop rhythms and chattering pulsations of excited particles.
Sluggish beats carry the lost hope of atonal brass in the funeral
march “This Is The Place Where The Dead Help The Living,” and hard
rhythms thrive beneath the long drones of “All Yours” as if Mlada
Fronta concert was happening in the basement of a coffee house where
Robert Fripp was performing a solo Frippertronics set.
“Wait Here” echoes. It evolves like the opening loop of a Sigur Rós song that has been time-stretched so far that the human
voice becomes just a swelling breath of sound. An eleven and a half
minute exhalation, “Wait Here” holds you on the cusp of dawn,
streaking the horizon with the barest hint of color. Suspended in
darkness, your head is slowly filled with echoes. “Vfd” takes the
dying echo of “Wait Here” and marches it across the discolored
horizon, cutting it up into a chattering syncopation and thrusting it
along with the prod of a heavy-footed beat. The final twenty-five
minutes of Noise for Lovers is the paired lullaby of “Goodnight
Princess” and “(Sweet Dreams)” that is a beautiful summation of the
elements heard previously on the record. This is a phantasmal ballad
for biomechanical babies, a drone poem about rust colored skies and
dervishes of sand and static.
Coupled with their last impressive release (Hollydrift’s
for the Tiller), Parasomnic is the label to watch for atmospheric
collage work. As much as I doubted a record could thrill me as much
as Hollydrift’s, I have to admit that I’m ready to choke on those
words after hearing Anaphylaxis. Noise for Lovers is a subtle
miasma, a toxic decay that creeps beneath a series of glorious tone
poems, a patina of rust that burnishes the belly of these long notes.
It takes a meticulous and discreet hand to make a noise record that
doesn’t rely on shattering sound systems and flensing ears. Jason
Coffman is my new hero.
Noise for Lovers is out now on Parasomnic.
