But it’s not all splatter. Soaring synths pierce the darkness with moments of light reminding me to look for that light, follow it down the tracks even as metallic crashes continue to cascade into crumbling piles of rust.
Haunting energies move through a series of moods
This music is like a flaying wind, blowing bits of sand and chewed up metal dust at a rusted out recycling plant into my face as I move through a post-industrial landscape littered with grime. There is an urgency here and I get the sense that I have a mission. I can see the beauty amidst the broken windows and the spray painted tags -more tags than actual legitimate throw ups or pieces. I chase these hastily scribbled lines through into a world of distorted haze.
If Vangelis had used more distortion on his synths, and added some killer beats to his palette, you’d get close to what M.Cadoo & P.Stephan are doing on Pang of Being. Perhaps I’m thinking of Vangelis because of the Philip K. Dick-esque world they conjure up. The tense frequencies they employ are as cinematic as they are science fictional. Looking around, I don’t know who is a replicant and who is real.
The music is real though and that is enough to snap me out of the trance caused by staring too long into the simulation.
Haunting energies move through a series of moods. Sometimes the music sounds like a tape is being sped up, or tape is running out, as things slide into a disarranged headspace. This must be the “audio smear” mentioned in the liner notes as played by M.Cadoo. I didn’t know audio smear was an instrument, but it’s one that works for me. It blurs out, sidewise. Another note on the instrumentation: Paul Stephan apparently uses “Dadaist pedal chains.” I love that idea. There does seem to be a thick amount of grit distorting the original signals they put forth through chains of electronic transformation.
The hum of chugging electrical generators ::
Low-end rattles and what sound like the hum of chugging electrical generators spray everything with what ham radio operators call QRM—the noise that makes the signal hard to decipher and hear. Another term used is “spurious emissions” caused when the equipment is faulty and things radiate out causing interference. There is lots of interference happening here. If you like your stereo slathered with these kinds of emissions then Pang of Being is for you.
But it’s not all splatter. Soaring synths pierce the darkness with moments of light reminding me to look for that light, follow it down the tracks even as metallic crashes continue to cascade into crumbling piles of rust.
Faraway trains are passing by, but I’m not on the train in a cushy sleeper car. If I happen to catch the train, it will be because I hop it like a traveling kid trying to get to a festival, but end up in a cold metal car that screeches along steel tracks into a distant wasteland. When I hop back off, closer to my destination, I find I might be in another part of the country, but the same malaise of broken buildings and decaying infrastructure remain all around me.
Is it any wonder that such music full of noise, full of menace, full of the dark cloud of anxiety continues to be made, album after album, by today’s musicians? They are evoking the world we live in. Yet there are moments of hope and the feeling of power also present. This is the Pang of Being referenced in the title as I listen. The pain each of us experience, measured out by moments of joy.
Pang of Being is available on Bandcamp.
