4. Winter of Discontent

First published in Plan B #39.

Angel – Hedonism (Editions Mego)
Aidan Baker/Tim Hecker – Fantasma Parastasie (Alien8)
Aidan Baker – I Wish Too, To Be Absorbed (Important)
Xela – In Bocca Al Lupo (Type)
Nordvagr – Pyrrhula (Cold Spring)

There’s a reason why, when you picture a male noise-fan, they’re always in an overcoat. It has something to do with the onset of winter, lashing rain, lowering skies, skin-abrading wind, darkness at noon, the jouissance of misery. Blog-owning noise-hacks don’t talk about ‘blizzards of guitar scree’ and ‘avalanches of distortion’ for nothing, you know. For those to whom misanthropy comes naturally – setting up, so the cliché goes, exclusion zones for ‘ordinary’ music fans: “Here Be Limited-Edition Lathe-Cuts” – shut-in brooding, reflection on the world’s unrelenting hostility, comes naturally.

Digital noise, as pioneered by the artists associated with Peter Rehberg’s Mego label in the late 90s, with its searingly cold, alien textures, its propensity for fractured forms, would seem the perfect soundtrack to this longest season. And, indeed, the first half of Hedonism, recorded by the duo of Dirk Dresselhaus (a.k.a. Schneider TM, the one behind that Smiths cover) and Pan Sonic’s Ilpo Väisänen, doesn’t disappoint: sudden bursts of sandpaper-on-skin rasp are combined with suppurating weight and slow, dejected sound-currents, machines drained of any analogue warmth purring, growling and droning to themselves, occasionally clawing for the jugular. Then, ‘Dropping The Ego’s splintered construct of weather-system noise and shattered, chirping electronics cuts into enigmatic electroacoustic rattlings, as if a laptop were duetting with a percussionist playing a concrete dungeon floor. The last two tracks, recorded at Väisänen’s Finnish cottage come as a wonderful shock: layering field recordings of streams and birdsong with alternately celebratory and ominous synths and a wealth of small sound-details, their unfolding in time is a drama in itself.

Aidan Baker’s work with Leah Buckareff as Nadja has supplied some of the most powerful listening experiences I’ve had this year; fellow-countryman Tim Hecker’s decayed, sun-blind noise has proved just as addictive, so Fantasma Parastasie makes for a delectable prospect. Divided, bizarrely, into 66 tracks in 7 movements, it focuses on and magnifies the occasional pools of stasis and immaterial, atmospheric swirl in both projects: ‘Hymn To The Idea Of Night’ swells with synthetic winds, girded by Baker’s subtle bass, circling within the same celestial textural pattern; ‘Gallery of the Invisible Woman’s omnipresent shrouds of subdued harmonics radiate mere unease, so the bass frequencies’ viciousness bashes the listener in the head; in ‘Dream of the Nightmare’, shimmers of sun-bright melody are heard only through a gradually thickening blanket of noise. You keep waiting in fear for the skull-smashing beats or eviscerating showers (weather metaphor!) of feedback, but nothing comes; which, in a way, is even more unnerving. Although it matches neither man’s best work, it’s an exquisite torture nonetheless.

The same can’t quite be said for I Wish Too, To Be Absorbed, a 2CD anthology of Baker’s solo work from rare and out-of-print CD-Rs released between 2000 and 2007. The majority of the first disk consists of rather wispy, portentous cloud formations of processed guitars, certainly nothing especially gripping, and the unity of feel, uncharacteristically, makes it samey and long-winded. The second, more purely abstract disk, where processing has usually gone so far as to almost erase any sense of human presence, is better, and makes for marvellous background listening (with a slight tug of unease, in case you feel weird about listening to ‘ambient music’. Freaks.)

Type Records owner John Twells, a.k.a. Xela, is a man who knows a thing or two about ambience, having released work by Grouper, Sylvain Chauveau and Machinefabriek. He also knows his horror: previous releases include a 12” with renderings of John Carpenter’s Halloween theme and Goblin’s ‘Suspiria’, and a H.P. Lovecraft-inspired ambient album. One could imagine him as the estranged Catholic brother to Burial Hex’s occult novitiate: the entire album is wrapped in a quieter, sanctified version of Initiations’ murky dungeon ambience; one can almost feel the dust and incense drifting through the church’s cavernous space. Everything here feels decayed: sound piles up – skeins of vinyl crackle, the echo of long-gone footsteps, bells etched in sonic memory like trauma scars, the sound-cloud, like a miked-up hornet swarm, that dominates ‘In Misericordia’. The entry of ritualistic percussion on the 20-minute closer, amid a pulsing cloud of noise and inhuman shrieks, feels like the aftershock of a sacrificial rite.

If you need anything else with which to while away the long night, there’s always the new Nordvagr release. Subtitled Black Ambient Droneworks, and recorded over the pitch-black Swedish winter of 2007-8, it does exactly what it says on the tin. At low volume, it gives a subtle seeping trickle of darkness to the air; at high, its relentless solemnity is pretty damn forbidding (if a little unintentionally funny.) If dark-as-fuck amorphous textures, freaky ghost-moans, church organs, distended black-metal treble guitars and Satanic choirs are your thing, then this will hit the spot nicely. And whatever you do: don’t go outside.