This is, if memory serves, the second time I’ll have reviewed something featuring Autotistika — the previous being his duo Non Ferric Memories, a shocking twelve years ago. I’m afraid I won’t be able to top the description “It sounds like someone flushing a magical toilet over and over” in this (or arguably any) review and they weren’t even my words. But let’s look on the bright side.
I can certainly say what it is to a degree — samples, loops, mixed-fidelity recordings, keys, dubby reverb tails on certain instruments. Where that places it in generic terms I’m not sure — something like lo-fi musique concrète or a less po-faced Nurse With Wound. It’s distinctly lo-fi but don’t let that fool you — the mixed-fidelity stuff means that some of the samples are nice and clean, others messy, many bent to ungodly shapes, sometimes static parts just leave a morse code-like anchor.
There’s a degree of confidence too — two forty-five(ish) minute pieces and lots of Autotistika giving himself space. The first track starts busy, turns into some dreamy drift for a few minutes, then moves to just a sample of hurried breath. It’s easy to throw everything in and move around quickly — anyone who’s been to a noise all-dayer will tell you that — but this unhurried, considered approach works well. I suspect these pieces are improvisatory, but I also get the impression Autotistika is sitting there for a bit going “yeah, that’ll scare the bejesus out of ’em”.
I ended up reaching for some quite heroic metaphors while making my notes: “There’s a guitar or something which sounds like an advert for snuff films while a ghost has the sniffles”; “those vocals are distinctly séancey”; “sample fuckry and … yes definitely haunted”; “Sellotape sound? But evil somehow?”. It’s definitely arguable that this is a side-effect of my own imagination, but I think also the record elicits a narrative that’s certainly cogent — insofar as its self-consistent — but nevertheless entirely mad.
I don’t listen to a lot of this stuff and mostly it’s because a kind of basic ‘spooky’, and basic esoteric magick markers start looking like cliché at some point, but this has the sort of consideration and attention-to-weirdness that elevates it into the beleaguered clouds of ‘uncanny’. Absurd Flesh certainly sounds like some stuff I know, but it’s by no means familiar. It is absolutely haunted and if you’re a fan of shit that sounds like the exact moment you slip into a coma in a submarine then this surely is the record for you.-Kev Nickells-
