About a year ago, we discussed a pioneering piece of Harvard University research, Thorsten A Cardy’s 2005 work “An Experimental Field Study of Ambient And Drone Based Music on Temporal Perception in Higher Mammals”. (The Annals of the American Academy of Auditory Zoology), which demonstrated how extreme ambient / drone music stimulates the part of the brain called Shatner’s Bassoon, which is the brain centre dealing with time perception.
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And on the showing of these twin releases, I Feel Like A Bombed Cathedral, the new project from Amaury Cambuzat – founder of French avant-garde experimentalists Ulan Bator and guitarist with the legendary faUSt – are surely a shoo-in for the soundtrack to take (wo)man to the fourth rock from the Sun.
Whether in Coventry or Cologne, bombed cathedrals have a concentrated and multi-layered symbolism that is difficult to ignore. During the attack on the former, the single biggest concentrated raid on Britain during the entire war, the smell and heat of the burning city were so intense that they reached up into the cockpits of the German bombers, some 6,000 feet above. One resident even recalled being pursued down a street by a knee-high river of boiling butter from a dairy ablaze nearby. Yet only a decade or so later, with animosities laid aside, Coventry was already twinned with Dresden, another site of almost unimaginable horror.Conjuring such intense imagery, the estimable Nick Soulsby says of I Feel Like A Bombed Cathedral: “The electric guitar stands as analogue to the cathedral: a blown-out shell echoing with imposing history, lineage, collapse and eternal potential”.
rec.requiem comprises four pieces: “Def” and “Esh”, two massive slabs of chilly ambient drone; “Req”, replete with worrying tolling drum which gives the whole thing an uneasy tension redolent of a scene in a Dario Argento movie just before something really appalling happens, and the gently drifting “Rev”. Christ, is it time to stock the SLS rocket already..?
AmOrtH is slightly different kettle of fish. Divided into the forty-minute title track and the just sub-fifteen-minute “Psalm 34”, these are granite edifice mega-drones that sound like they could have been crystallised from felsic magmas during the Precambrian era. And, with that in mind, there is no doubt that they benefit from being playedREALLY
LOUD
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Phase IV complete, we are green for landing. Really? I’ve barely made it through the first track yet. Can’t we do another orbit or two so I can finish the whole album?No, the Red Planet won’t wait. I’ve seen the future, baby, and it’s drone-shaped.
-David Solomons-
