(07.08.06) I find myself wondering about the mundane machinery that makes up the human body as I listen to Beyond Sensory Experience’s The Dull Routine of Existence. Their second release for Sweden’s Cold Meat
Industry after a triptych of dark ambient perambulations for Old Europa Café, The Dull Routine of Existence is more somber introspection. Meant for headphones or sensory deprivation chambers, BSE’s work is the sort of ghostly ambience that mutters and sibilates in the dark shadows of your psyche. Thematically arranged around the mundane routines of every day existence, these ten tracks offer nocturnal moods wherein you can examine your own waking and dreaming realities. As I fall under the spell of the hissing static and spectral bells of “Paralysed,” I wonder if my heart will continue beating, if my lungs will continue to do their work, as I detach from my physical meatsack and mentally wander off. Lured away by the Pied Piper of BSE’s hallunicatory ambience.
“Mute Conclusion” is the final radiance of the white light that takes you to heaven: all crackly atmospherics, a droning arrangement of old organ pipes, distant mechanical percussion, and warped voices intoning ultimate rituals of absolution over your still corpse. Your spirit breaks free of the flesh and is carried towards the center of the light by a solar wind, a blowing gust that takes on its own melodic overtones as it lifts you. “Escapism” moans with spectral wind while an old piano groans out a lugubrious melody. As a recital of our dull existence, “Escapism” threatens to be the very opposite, a re-occuring oubliette of despair that ultimately crushes you. “Kverulant” quivers with drums and strident piano (and the careless echo of an empty washtub and an old set of bedsprings), a martial hymn filled with the mournful loneliness of a lover not won, a future not seized, a heart
not stirred. The echoes become more aquatic as the melody becomes the tinkling sound of a tiny music box — our lives reduced to a tin melody pounded into a thimble.
Static covers everything on The Dull Routine of Existence, a crackling veil that disguises the proceedings. It may simply be the noise of life that perpetually interferes with our everyday melodies and moods, or it may be the fact that our routines have worn everything down so much that this needle, this groove, has become filled with grit and decay. The vinyl is old, our loops are sagging, and our echoes are but mere ghosts of imperfect memories. Our dull routines become decrepit ambience filled with haunts and spooks and old Victrola melodies that warp the more they fade. Tragic and beautiful, the very sort of soundtrack the Romantic Poets would have loved to hear while dying of consumption.
The Dull Routine of Existence is out now on Cold Meat Industry.
- Cold Meat Industry
- Beyond Sensory Experience
