Three releases in as many weeks after a comparatively frugal 2011 release schedule so close to the witching time implies otherwise. So turn off those dreadful remakes of already dreadful Hallowe’en horror bores and tune in to something genuinely creepy.
(November 2011) And so the corpse of another Hallowe’en lies broken and bloodied atop of a pile of festering, grimacing pumpkins, sweet wrappers and cheap discarded face masks. Oh sure, it might be “fun” to dress up and run around bothering the neighbours for free garbage, but that doesn’t stop it from being one of the world’s silliest annual festivities, the very latest to be seized upon by advertising executives as another way to foist useless, ephemeral crap on the public. Yes, I’m one of those miserly people who always seem to get their “comeuppance” in silly eighties monster flicks, busily pretending I’m not at home and waiting for the whole sorry debacle to end so I don’t have to tell teenagers who should know better to bugger off…
Type have ordered up a devilishly different way to celebrate this most recently commercialised, cash-cow bobbins-fest with a trio of dark, filthy and downright terrifying new releases in the dark ambient, drone and black metal genres. Coincidence? Three releases in as many weeks after a comparatively frugal 2011 release schedule so close to the witching time implies otherwise. So turn off those dreadful remakes of already dreadful Hallowe’en horror bores and tune in to something genuinely creepy.
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Indignant Senility :: Consecration of the Whipstain
After the smeary, smudged and stained remnants of Indignant Senility’s début, ‘Plays Wagner,’ it might come as a surprise to find that of these three new dingy horrors on Type, Pat Maher’s sophomore album Consecration of the Whipstain is probably the most accessible. Having failed to really get ‘Plays Wagner’ upon its release I surprised myself by picking this up right away based solely on brief samples (which provide not even a smidgen of the detail and sumptuous atmosphere of the complete works) and it has re-ignited an interest in drone-based and dark ambient music. The longer this genre hangs around, the more investment and invention is required in order for a release to stand out in a saturated market, and this has benefited the genre in many ways.
This double-album (pressed at 45 RPM, by the way, in case like myself you got it wrong the first time round) mirrors the ‘Plays Wagner’ format in that it consists of only four lengthy tracks. Ranging from fifteen to seventeen minutes in duration, Consecration of the Whipstain is a shorter work, but where ‘Plays Wagner’ twisted and turned in a way that made sense when subsequently edited down and broken up into eleven discernible chapters for a compact disc release, so this album is far more concerned with the slow, but never uneventful journey through four progressive and sonically distinct environments.
Maher slaps the listener full in the face by kicking the album off with it’s most extreme sonic landscape. Stifled and distorted screams weave through a hazardous, threatening fog of sonic debris so thick it becomes almost impossible to pick out individual elements of the piece. The metallic seventeen minutes of “Color Absolution” are initially less memorably flavoured, awash with shivering, stone-cold slabs of freezing drones much like “Waking Extirpation,” but then a spine-tinglingly unsettling stream of death rattles, chitinous clawing, scraping and unidentifiable metallic crashes enters the fray. Perhaps the most successful (not to mention accessible) disc is definitely the second, however. “No One (Elapsed)” slurs closest towards the ‘Plays Wagner’ aesthetic as the mangled ghosts of classical music and big band performances leak through from the other side on chill winds that rush through the midnight blue of echoing, spectral crypts.
Worth the price of admission alone is the final piece “I Work For the Whip.” Opening with a stupendous bass rumble, the sound stage is filled with the criss-crossing of swooping aircraft noise and the growl of hauler engines, all melted into a thick, molten mass. There’s nary a single moment where some unique sound isn’t heard amongst the overhead chaos – the whoosh of steam, the clang of metal, a guttural exhalation of breath. Headphones are definitely recommended for this piece for two reasons: firstly it allows you to fully appreciate the all-encompassing experience created from a phenomenally dense, layered and varied sound-palette at the tracks core; and secondly because on speakers you need to crank up the volume to truly appreciate it, and doing so makes it sound like your home is the target of an air raid. The neighbours will complain!
Type’s package design goes from strength to strength and here we have another glorious cover, beautiful typography and an overall aesthetic oddly reminiscent of Aphex Twin’s ‘SAWII’ that includes limited chestnut brown vinyl and textural, monochrome photography on the disc labels. Utterly essential for drone, noise and ambient fans alike, Consecration of the Whipstain is also a great place to start a long voyage into the very bowels of the dark ambient underworld, especially if you start at the end and work backwards. This is a release that could convert even the most hardened drone sceptics.
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Next comes the incredibly busy, Ohio-based Mike Shiflet’s cheerily titled ‘Sufferers,’ delivered on limited edition, translucent bottle-green vinyl housed in a matte-laminated sleeve adorned with gloomy, charcoal macro-photography that renders plant-life as twisted, metallic gore.
Easily the most noise-driven of these three releases, ‘Sufferers’ swings between gravelly, distressed grating and rumbling through to hallucination-inducing, glassy drones. Split into five tracks, cut on the vinyl as two long pieces, but that also forms one long seamless piece, the initial cracking of “(Sufferers)” opens up the album to evoke haunting, endless, grey skied industrial landscapes (think Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Red Desert”), the faintest noise of acoustic guitar masked by an irksome, warbling whistle before the canvas is destroyed by grit, and smashed stone, a wall of radio white noise and grating engines. This is overtaken on “Sufferers” by a vile, scratchy, sucking sound, viciously rasping vinyl crackle and a howling cacophony of flying dirt and debris.
“Axle Grease” provides the only sanctuary in the storm, as a tubular, crystal drone describes a slow melody over soft distortion for a displacing, hypnotizing twelve minutes. Best of all, though, is the strangely addictive white squall of “Blessed and Oppressed.” A two-note, haunted whistle is drowned in a vast control-room of burbling computer twitter, muffled chatter, compressed and distorted communique as if heard in the middle of some vast monitoring station, the blast of a sandstorm outside still audible through thick walls. The final track “No Sanctuary” deposits the listener in the bowels of some huge subterranean structure, nothing audible but the slowly rising growl of machinery and bristling electrical energy.
‘Sufferers’ is not a lengthy LP, for some probably just as well as the intense noise of its five different sonic locations could prove suffocating, however a digital-only “Extended Mixes” version also exists that almost doubles the length of the album’s first three tracks, making one wonder why ‘Sufferers’ wasn’t released as a double LP like Consecration of the Whipstain. Of these three entries in Type’s canon it is ‘Sufferers’ is the one that demands the most from the listener, as Shiflet’s unremittingly bleak sound design is positively flooring. Definitely a release for those with a disturbingly vivid imagination.
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William Fowler Collins :: The Resurrections Unseen
Touted jokingly as Type’s signature 2011 Hallowe’en release – October 31st was its release date after all – William Fowler Collins returns to Type to deliver more blackest ever black ambient. WFC’s debut for Type – 2009’s ‘Perdition Hill Radio’ – was a divisive release due to its patent excesses. Described by the label as effectively “black metal” WFC has removed almost all trace of the genre on ‘The Resurrections Unseen’ by compressing and destroying all the evidence leaving little more than texture, atmosphere and an all-pervading sense of dread. It also bears the distinction of being one of the finest examples of Type’s minimalist take on record sleeve perfection, the scarily suggestive artwork (by WFC himself apparently) being an exceptionally good foil for the signature matte-laminated, hefty card stock sleeves, and limited first editions are pressed on absolutely exquisite, translucent blood red vinyl.
“First Breath” is purely and simply the scouring noise of distant motorways blown to the tied and gagged listener across flat, concrete space, a howling wind piercing to the core. What begins as just sub-bass drones in “The Light In The Barn” or “Warm Transport” are joined only by haunted moan-drones whilst “Premonition at Dusk” is like a sustained scream in a hurricane. “Abattoir” slowly builds a choir of frost-breathing spectres, then ebbs and flows across an extended, silhouetted journey through a maniac’s back yard, breaking apart in the final three minutes to reveal a glittering clatter and desperate scrabbling.
By this time you’re probably getting the general idea – it’s a horror record right? Well sure, but it avoids any unsubtlety that such a label might suggest, the whole thing sandblasted and eroded beyond recognition. The sound design seems determined to conjure vast, empty landscapes like the eerie silence of a quarantined research facility in the middle of a desert or the looming midnight shadows of barns and warehouses on a sleeping farm.
The build-up of the two-part “Embracing Our Own Annihilation” is particularly compelling, as if some vast approaching entity were slowly casting a doom-laden shadow over the landscape. Quite why there is an audible white space between parts one and two is a mystery, however. Indeed, by the time “Ghost Choir” plays the album out one could accuse ‘The Resurrections Unseen’ of being ultimately a little samey, a perception that could perhaps have been mitigated somewhat if it weren’t needlessly broken down into quite as many individual tracks. Nevertheless, there’s more than enough here to feed the imagination: shadows looming on every corner, strange movements in the corner of your eye – something rattling in the attic. Probably best not to be on your own with this one.
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All release above are released on Type.
