Like a woozy descent into the abyss, Gary Mundy‘s latest emission as Kleistwahr seizes control of the horizontal hold as well as the vertiginous, propelling the listener into a seemingly endless spiral of dissolution and unheimlich disturbance.
Over Your Heads Forever is an epic trip, a scorching journey from alpha to omega in fifty minutes or a lifetime, the sort of music which proffers the opportunity to step outside the quotidian, to undertake what resembles nothing so much as a ritual musical enactment of birth, death and everything in between (and perhaps thereafter).
The sensation of uncontrolled falling engendered over the course of the opening “The Last Chain That Bound, The Spoiler Now Rends” sets in dreamlike fashion the operating parameters for the remainder of the album. “Neighbourhood Of Nothing” is as suitably bleak as its accompanying video, surging and splaying the hinted and splintered chords into the fug of drone and echoing screams both human and otherwise that fill the void with wall-to-wall earbleed noise. Cranked up, this is the way to blot out the exterior world, but perhaps not the voices in here or out there, nor the suffocating pressure of life within and without the rat-race.
Likewise, when the proper blistering spasms are set loose, they sunder time and space into their component forms, leaving them separated and at odds, ripping perspective a new one and summoning a feeling that the habitual dimensions are teetering on the brink of an all-consuming chaos; “In Spite Of It All …. We Cursed Through Sludge” indeed, the track titles providing a neat summation of the middle passage into the formless dark. Loops bring structural relief to the fray and flay, elevating the mood to somewhere more optimistic, but Mundy isn’t keen to let proceedings remain in the light for too long yet, save for it might be the heat and light of a burning star core. Twisting and sizzling among the broken trails of feedback in excelsis, garbled words boil spluttering to the surface before being dragged into the ever-hungry gravity well, control of the airwaves seized and disrupted by heavy sunspot activity.Such brutalism offers little in the way of relief, so when merely distended and overloaded melodies are allowed to burrow into view, the apparent sense of calm and tranquillity is entirely illusory — this is the stuff of nightmares proper, like running through a reverberant hall of mirrors as reality crashes to smithereens. Heads suitably cracked open, teeth set on edge and psyche given a thorough rinsing, what is a listener to do but seek refuge in the blessed relief of time-stretched swarms and drones that the final section offers. Is this a glimpse of somnolent heaven in electronic form? Are those angelic choirs or a simulacrum thereof? Delay FX can have that effect, longform ripples and billows of cloud-like bliss replacing the visceral storms that came before, conjuring a wholly different kind of illumination, chilled and soothing where the blistering fires once raged.
-Linus Tossio-
