Either stretched or undersized, all the write-ups of this series share a common objective: catch up, catch up, catch up. These records are but two of the hundreds that were forwarded to me last year. A long way to go, and my intention is still to keep walking. Remember: I do listen to EVERYTHING sent to my attention – eternal thanks, to ALL of you – but miracles are impossible. Therefore I’m currently trying to improve the purple prose/concision proportionality, not always effectively in all honesty (check the second review, a veritable flamboyant hymn to sociopathic behaviour; the first is not bad in that sense, too). It usually depends on the moment in which one listens. In music, curiosity does NOT kill the cat: therefore, sniff around or click those links if interested.
DALGLISH – Ideom
Record Label
Dalglish is a pseudonym for Chris Douglas, who started his activities in the 90s creating “dance-oriented experimental electronic music”. There’s nothing to boogie with in Ideom, but something can be made of the plethora of unusual sounds that the record presents. Clusters of synthetic pimples totally ineligible for humdrum new age or space backwardness of the fourth kind get scattered around amidst promiscuous rhythmic figurations and hostile brain-teasing nightmares where spastic robots decide what’s tolerable and what’s not. Besmirched washes of evocative electronica help orientating a perplexed listener between oppressive inaptness and intermittent nirvanas. Thought-provoking, often painstakingly specific, never repellent stuff.
CRAIG HILTON – The Smoking Mirror
Young Girls
A typical example of unexpected “wow” after slicing open an innocuous packet of CDRs. Three tracks from a composer who was totally and shamefully unknown to me before today, working in the frightening fringes of electroacoustic authenticity. The 35-minute “He Who Walks Among Us” is a puzzlingly haunting amassment of ringing shades - from string-like to metallic, a sort of “Glenn Branca meets Mirror at David Jackman’s house” - and organic percussiveness following Martian harmonic laws, moving in succession along paths leading to an undesired wisdom permeated of unworldly non-comprehension, overawing gloom and disheartening remorselessness, highlighted by droning undulations that literally grip the stomach pit during selected – and magnificent - sections of the piece. “Possessor Of The Earth And Sky” introduces further explorations in the macrocosm of unforgiving scouring, echoing squeals and clashing upper partials intersected in archaic blessedness, roaring inscrutabilities determining the abatement of the lucidity rate until a chaotic underworld full of chipmunk-voiced fiends and giant buzzing flies annihilates our defences. “Is An Enemy Of Both Sides” seals and stamps the program with a subterranean chorale of out-of-tune corpses trying to understand the right direction to end, at the very least, in a purgatory where grimacing faces of drunk necromancers testify to the impossibility of arriving at the required levels of psychological balance. Should you feel gone astray in these opulently gothic soundscapes, no worry: the worst is yet to come. Don’t try this at home if you’re depressed, it is pretty heavy – and, to a degree, absolutely brilliant.
