As the World Rots Away is a poison pen letter to optimists, written in guitar, electronics and percussion, cohesively rancorous but also beautifully varied and lucid within its constraints.
Recently, veteran international experimentalist Eraldo Bernocchi commented that he felt himself being drawn back to what he calls “direct” music. “Back to the roots of my explorations… I need stuff that speaks directly to my heart. The more complex and arranged it is the more annoys me to death and makes me nervous.”
To be frank, most of Bernocchi’s music—maestro of the moonless night—already makes me nervous. While the zeitgeist dictates that we get all Khalil Gibran about our planet—so blue and green, so fragile, we its curators, charged with passing it on as we found it to our children—for Eraldo Bernocchi, the world is tragically entropic; an extended, nasty, messy decline, oblivion its ultimate reality. For decades now, he has helped hasten its downfall, pulverizing mountain tops and kicking clods out of its surface, perhaps most bloodcurdlingly when slow, direct and dark as SIMM or one-third of Equations of Eternity with Bill Laswell and Mick Harris.
Blackwood is the latest iteration of this slow, pathogenic drawl, inspired by doom metal, dub and illbient, while at the same time being unmistakably Bernocchi. As the World Rots Away is a poison pen letter to optimists, written in guitar, electronics and percussion, cohesively rancorous but also beautifully varied and lucid within its constraints. With one exception (“Breaking God’s Spine,” in which an hysterical woman Jesus-freaks out as a growling Anti-Christ urges her on), vocal samples are mantric, cunningly woven directly into the fabric of the music. As a guitarist, he is a bin-shaking, apex predator, capable of bringing down anything in his way. Following the lead of the club-footed beat, he opens huge gaps in the earth, piledrives “Sodom” into dust.
As the World Rots Away is certainly direct music, piercing the very pith and marrow.
As the World Rots Away is available on Subsound.
