PBK, Warfare State/Appealdouble cassette, 2011Impulsy StetoskopuWrapped up in tin-foil like a tempting block of chocolate, this impressively packaged double album features a portrait of Kropotkin on the front, Schwitters on the back and on the inside of the over-sized J card the text of the Ursonate imposed of the war wracked ruins of a European city I can't identify. The inspiration for this release comes from the early twentieth century, a time when scientific, political and artistic hope was dashed to hell by bloody minded nationalist politics and bloody minded economic expedience in the mechanised hell of war. The idealistic optimism of Anarchism dissolved into the outraged cynicism of Dadaism by bombs, machine guns and mustard gas. From now on, the best of science and human resource would be whored out to the desires of war, like a temple priestess of an eternal religion forced to fuck in the brothels of the nation state.
The first, titular track is very much what I would call "Ambient Noise" in that it is messy, coagulated, a mass of sounds based on rushing, crashing and some vocal keening that is enmeshed together not so much a collage as an abstract audio painting. A lengthy block of sound with intimate detail presented as a vague whole. Any misgivings about the original tape material being "digitally remastered" are gone with the pleasing coagulated atmosphere of the sound.
The following track, "Kropotkine", sounds more like the PBK material I'm familiar with, a kind of rhythmic creak and scrape of unidentified sounds overlaid with swirls, clangs, groans and slushes. It's like looking into a microscope and seeing invisible creatures enlarged and moving, interacting, ignoring, feeding on and fleeing from each other. This is followed by one of the newer additions, "CNT Oct 1910" (the month and year of the National Confederation of Labourers' founding in Spain), a very Industrial sounding piece recalling the clanking, punching machines many industrial workers where obliged to hear in the course of the daily work. The constant rhythm of machinery overlaid with buzzing and whirring, building a continuous momentum, a Brutalist reflection of industry. Not sure what the verbal reference to the Baltic at the end of the piece is meant to mean within the pieces' context, though. Side two starts with a live piece based on pulsing electronics, solid yet modulated tones allowed to stand over the backbone, screaming lines of delayed synth over that again. Element desist and others grow. It builds and contracts slowly through it's duration through a series of both guttural and high-pitched sounds, and is immaculately controlled and composed, not a second wasted. Annoyingly, however, there's a vocal I.d. For the radio station this piece was broadcast for before returning to what I'm assuming is the rest of it. PBK's version of "Ursonate" has the voices garbled through effects, while softly hissing and slushing electronic sounds are laced with a solemn trumpet – the comparison overall to Throbbing Gristle is impossible not to make. It's a more abstracted, intricate affair than the other pieces, sparsely laid out. The final piece, "Sanctuary", being a slow, more obviously ambient piece of layered synth and electronic sounds, a simple description of those elements not doing it much justice I'm afraid. Suffice to say it has a distinct, fluid chill, staid drones and pulses settling into the whole cohesively.
The second album, "Appeal", is, I think, a more recent work. There is a distinct post-Industrial feel to the sound of this album. There are seven un-named tracks that rely on synthesisers, samples and effects, usually a thick echo. The overall sound is cold and slow but has measurable emotional impact, mainly due to the intelligent mixing of disparate sounds within their arrangements. Here is where PBK really comes into his own, as a composer. Years of experience tell. There is no lazy settling into one particular feel or another, nor is there any amateurish confusion with the sound. Track two features long, extended drones and tones that build, stay, then go from and into each other, melting from one to the other meticulously. Track three is an almost angry, certainly aggressive rhythmic piece of electronic Industrial sounding clang. Five seems composed of almost transparent, distant and distinctly echoed sounds, probably the slowest and most remote of the pieces here. The over all tone is dark – it would be a bit too easy to categorise this as "Dark Ambient" but there are distinct elements of that, particularly on the final piece. But there is a distinctiveness here that remains very much PBK's own sound.
