Swiss experimental trio Film 2 like to play with the listener’s perceptions, their kraut-influenced brand of seamless, rhythmic noise enclosing the audience in an inescapable web of repetitive, cryptic waves. Echoing, cyclical drums pound out a remorseless beat, an emergence of sounds like a draught blowing something cold and portentous in your general direction, but just out of reach. Simmering guitar streaks, like intimations of an avalanche bring veiled threats, blocking out any sight of the sky.
Overwhelmed by the growling sonics, a feedback wall slowly advances and retreats, edging ever nearer and as the drum patterns change, so a slightly different perspective is shown. The guitar swells, metamorphosing, searching for another way in and as the drums increase their potency, so the guitar recharges, the sinuous movements of the whole utterly absorbing, the kinetic flow subtly increasing. Voices appear, wild and unfathomable; guitars increasing their ferocity, drums pummelling in a cathartic expulsion of energy.
This expurgation of voices and drums repeating is like a black hole around which our minds are circling, unable to pull away until we are into the void, bereft of all but a digital scurf that obliterates all that came before and scours the passages; a complete antithesis that slowly erodes the senses, microtonal shifts worming their way deeper until the drums return and scatter the tones like a kaleidoscope. It grows more vibrant, cymbals crashing, dancing a voodoo stomp over any grave it can find, its continuous trammelling and the grinding tones filling in any gaps.It is a trance-inducing mania that will have you one way or another, intensely relentless and compellingly so. You find yourself hooked up to the last second and then released distraught when all goes quiet. Film 2 has found a deep-down need that we all have and satisfied it wholly for forty minutes. What more could we want?
-Mr Olivetti-
One version of Sorge (for there are three) can be heard here for 12 hours at every full and new moon.
