Cyclobe – Wounded Galaxies Tap At The Window

Phantomcode

The vinyl version of Cyclobe’s long-awaited follow up to 2001’s The Visitors sneaked out a few months back as a limited edition pressing, but 2011 sees the welcome wider release of a CD edition. The album has inevitably drawn comparisons with Coil; not only did Stephen Thrower and Ossian Brown themselves both serve time in the group, but guests on Wounded Galaxies Tap at the Window include fellow Coil sidemen Thighpaulsandra and Cliff Stapleton. In the light of Sleazy’s recent passing, it’s certainly tempting to see Cyclobe as picking up the baton to continue the unique sonic quest that Coil initiated, and that Sleazy continued in his Threshold Houseboys Choir project.

The record opens with the lovely “How Acla Disappeared from Earth,” a shimmering and stately overture that invokes a sense of otherworldly melancholy, suggesting some mysterious distant loss. The funereal pace yet weightless feel of the piece sets out the mood of the album. The splendidly-named “The Woods Are Alive with the Smell of His Coming” follows, and at seventeen and a half minutes, forms the centerpiece of the album. A repetitive rhythmic figure played on what might be a marimba continues throughout the piece as all manner of sounds slowly weave their way in and around, taking the listener on a journey through landscapes of another world, at various points scary, soothing, hopeful, sad and even funny. The skillful blending of electronic and acoustic sounds dislocates the sonic landscape from any trace of the presence of either machines or musicians, giving the music a sense of being a natural phenomenon rather than a man-made construction.

This spell is slightly broken on “We’ll Witness the Resurrection of Dead Butterflies,” which opens with Cliff Stapleton’s hurdy gurdy, serving to snatch the listener back through the looking glass into an earthier, if corrupted and archaic world. The lengthy three-part “Sleeper” kicks off with reverberating subterranean crashes, possibly a long lost field recording retrieved from Dante or Orpheus, before a sparse piano enters, floating in disquieting electronic ambience and then punctuated by the only human sound on the album, a disembodied childlike voice flatly intoning indecipherable phrases before fading into a cosmic soup of blips and glitches. The title track closes the album and is a darker companion to the opener, solemn drones punctuated by ominous electronic interference before eventually achieving a celestial calm.

No doubt the esoteric song titles and Fred Tomaselli’s fascinating sleeve art add greater layers of meaning to the music for those in the know, but the album’s pagan magic is wholly evident to the uninitiated. Cyclobe’s impressive aptitude for layering endless textures into a highly complex sound world while maintaining the illusion of primal clarity results in an album that reveals itself further with every subsequent play.

Following Jhonn Balance’s death in 2004, Threshold Houseboys Choir’s Form Grows Rampant hinted at how Coil’s maverick body of work might be used as a springboard for a fresh avenue of musical and philosophical exploration and remains one of the most groundbreaking works of the century to date. Wounded Galaxies… can be seen as a parallel alternative avenue, similarly drawing on the past while taking very much its own route into the unknown. Cyclobe have made as big a step forward from The Visitors as that album was from the preceding Luminous Darkness and in Wounded Galaxies Tap at the Window have created one of the very best records of 2010.

-Alan Holmes-