G*Park – Sub

23five

This is like being trapped in the bubbling workings of a psychotic mind, reason lost in a fevered turmoil of carrion flies waltzing with the concrete scrape of the speakers. Feels like your head’s being invaded (especially on headphones) – neurons, a rutted dirt track between left and right hemispheres, full of scythed MRI slices and quaking vellum, scuttling insects and the odd snorting beast. Disembodied electro-acoustics that disconcert, shunt, scamper, effectively break through that brittle listener/musician divide.

The hairy, diseased colouration of the cover sets the scene, like a petri dish pixilation of an autopsy. An autopsy of sound; a trickle of psychological uncertainties that play brilliantly with your imagination. Feels like something coming through the wall at you, as if the dust has been magnified or displaced by invisible worms gnawing behind the skirting, prising at the rusting tacks and plaster. Late night plays of this freak me out like Zero Kama‘s human bone orchestrations still do.

That scurrying of crumbling debris gets right under your skin, seems to chew on your skull, whereas other bits remind me of the claustrophobic grace that those French brothers Etant Donnes wield, punching at the psyche in abrupt potent dramas. Jittery bombs that explode, explore, picking locks to those less travelled corridors of your mind. You’re a hostage to sensation, with no idea what’s going to happen next. Things take you unawares, sudden strangled gasps of feathered asphyxiation, the brief blooms of rupturing unpleasantness spewing from the drones.

As you can probably tell I’m smitten – I love this sort of thing. It could be pushed a smidgen more extreme maybe, but I’m not complaining. It’s a vivid and descriptive bleed of natural/synthetic diameters and nervous detailing that hits the spot. A momentum whose smothered contours revel in a gristly play of hissological hum and reoccurring weathered swarms, punctuated in the oblique sawings of motorised scupper.

Loving the ambiguity – is that beaten grain or the flap of large wing spans? Questions caught in the whir of a blender. The physicality too; gleaming with sounds that are ‘surreally’ real, that bone-dry displacement of pebbles fooling your eyes to follow a rolling descent into nowhere, or the way crow caws are abruptly scissored from the cord-pulled corpse of a porcelain doll.

I only ever heard Marc Zeier‘s work on compilations before, his atmospheres always tantalisingly vibrant but far too brief; great to finally listen to a whole double album’s worth.

-Michael Rodham-Heaps-