We’re confronted with a seething mass of turmoil of lively raw material of fierce density and unstable formations—iterative flows heaving with an organic-seeming stream of digital and electronic materials.
‘Noise, repetition, abstraction and experimentalism’ is the creed espoused by Paskine, Marseille/Brussels-based artist/musician whose experiments previously glimpsed on UNTTLD (Abstract Reflektions, 2012) resume here courtesy of neonate French label, Voxxov, last represented by Damian Valles and Hakobune. It sees him push his sound further into a deconstructive miasma of submerged melody, static fields, unwonted sounds from field recordings, old vinyl, and computer-generated synthesis with occasional rusted beats. Title NIMROD takes its name from the expedition to Antarctica led by British explorer, Shackleton, and the ship aboard which this polar exposure was navigated; the narrative serving suggestion renders an otherwise abstract-inclined series of compositions into a compelling document of elemental extremes, of cold, hunger and atmospheric conditions, along with the creeping physical depredations visited on the body (cf. Shackleton’s South).
We’re confronted with a seething mass of turmoil of lively raw material of fierce density and unstable formations—iterative flows heaving with an organic-seeming stream of digital and electronic materials. The title track delves deep into dark (natch) tunnels of caliginous ambient and grimy noise forms—blown-out shards and smears of harmony, hiss, hum and pummelling. The corroded timbres of “Fata Morgana,” a phantom manifestation of bass submersions and glacial drones, are irrupted into by crustily oxidized click-cycles, surfing delay-detritus and a reverb-rubble. Rhythm crackles at the outset of “White Elephant” collapse in on themselves, slipping into an ambient scrim that attenuates in substance without losing its edge. “Phantom Limbs” has aleatory motifs collide finding accidental telos in rhythmic spasm, melody struggling to loop in broken rotation, tremulous, storm-wracked. “Failure” goes to the heart of darkness, a sonic representation of someone/something breaking up, a sullen weight of layers of slow crackle-eroded drone in cavernous resonance, percussive loops resounding into a twilight zone. The buried melodies of the all too brief “Silence” sound as if an amnesiac straining to recall a far-off sliver of musical memory. Paskine seems to relent on “North,” whose initially more consonant subtly shifting textures suggest some solace, cleared of its cache of glitch and fidget; illusory, alas, submitting as it does to a slow fall inward into a humming clangor of :zoviet*France: post-industrial shuffle. “Leviathan” likewise crawls creakily around the underground, rattling and rumbling, melody struggling to find fuller voice, before finding it on the final “Disclosure,” a crunchy IDM-derivative as full of chewy resonance as anything on igloomag go-tos, Tympanik Audio or n5MD.
Overall, then, NIMROD is a sonic document of the abyssal, the tempestuous, and the desolate—tracts wherein chthonic and etiolated sonorities seem to snag themselves, distending into caustic drones, dissolving in micro-sound clouds. Ultimae co-owner Vincent Villuis (aka AES Dana) masters, optimizing its shades and colors of antarctic blast and ice, crackle and rust of metamorphosed sound strata to range from more articulate filmic articulation to the vanishing point of bleak abstraction.
NIMROD is available on Voxxov [digital | CD]
