Label: Phantom Code/World Serpent Format: CD
The title of Cyclobe‘s second album release soon becomes fitting as the music opens out, expands and contracts, almost oozes from the pores in the breathing walls – but where are they visiting from exactly? Some might suggest grayling spacefarers, others could contend, quite successfully, that the source of the sonic visitations lies closer to the realms of the subconscious, and of muti-dimensional minds at that. Perhaps Stephen Thrower and Simon Norris are the visitors, popping ’round to warp some minds and entertain, Puckishly and Pan-like, for the duration of a short step outside time and to rest awhile at their strange hotel of sound.
The Visitors has a soundtrack feel to its ambiance, telling stories of states of mind and places outside the everyday sphere where the memes and archetypes live, rolling in on a foaming spume and digital voices from the back of the room, just there, in the shadows. Shivery glitches and cello drones make play with the downward seep of a textured violin and the exterior sound of a hurdy-gurdy, stage left. The trip (and it is a trip) coruscates with uncertainty – who is out there? It’s probably just the FBI, knocking down the door and turning on the mind probe, dear. These scampering, slippery twitches are not the alien signifiers of close encounters of the cuddly kind, more of a lurking horror switched into gear on the perverted logic of a Giallo timescape.
Dark ambience isn’t an adequate term; perhaps getting the fear is, and dammit if Gosh-Wow, Sense of Wonder doesn’t creep in with the twiddled lateral orchestrations too. Pulsar electronics tap out signals on a thousand year journey from the salon to the stars in a measure; the beholders of the beauty may see through different eyes to standard, and the ears are attuned to a music of analogue spheres and ones and zeroes alike. It never seemed like the spaceships might creak so much, but apparently, they do in Cyclobe’s universe – but just listen to the Muzak™. When the running water boils into synthetick life as a trickle of acoustic lifeform consciousness on “First Memorable Conversation With A Chimera”, the question of what it’s banalities might be like notwithstanding, the drained degeneration into scuffed murmurs and febrile electronic humour makes moot the possibility of mutual understanding, but hints at the phantasmagorical shiveriness of such an exchange.
Creating the alien within and without to the rhythmic and melodic stringed accompaniment of their visitations, Thrower and Norris pull beauty from chaos and return the favour to the effects units, drifting then flowing from the passion of “If You Want To See That Nothing Is Left” into the widescreen freefall glimmer of the solar winds which summon the propulsive beat and bass-sweep dementia of “Strix Nebulosa” before a detour into more down to Earth wind instrumentation coiled around bitstreams and lancing tones. The elevation into “Replaced By His Constellation” is accompanied by an apparent choir of deracinated electronic voices, chittering and meeping to the rising spirals of synthesis and shuddery chord arrangements, pencilling a web of crackles and compelling glitched-over electronic rhapsody which seem to urge the listener off world, and quick about it. Beguiling and disconcerting at the same time, The Visitors hints it may just be time to leave the planet after all, if not in person then by musical means if necessary, floating out on a warm tidal wash of bass tones and the sea of the inner ear.
-Antron S. Meister-
