Kjostad / Ligatur – Overgrown
Remember that Phocomelus tape, Bit Of Rough? This sounds nothing like it but the title would definitely work. There's a bit more rough to this one. Actually, A Shitload Of Rough. That's the title I would've given. (The one they went with is pretty good, too.)
Kjostad kicks off with the side-long "Kabetogama". Mmm, looks like a nice place. From the wiki, "The Kabetogama State Forest is a state forest located in Koochiching and Saint Louis counties, Minnesota. Popular outdoor recreational activities are largely centered on the abundant lakes and rivers in the forest, such as boating, canoeing, kayaking, and making fuckloads of harsh noise." Just quoting here. But I dunno if I completely buy that last bit. There is noise, and it is harsh, but there are a number of elements in play. Trees, for starters. Rocks. Dirt. Gravel. Used condoms. The sound has a certain virile elasticity, stretching tight around throbbing layers of roughly abused gristle, buried deep in the overgrown thatch. Not quite the sort of thing to feature in the brochure. Grubby field recordings, char-burnt electronics, freakishly deformed tumescence worming, lustfully, through thickening, festering, growth.
Kabetomaga. Out in the wide open calm, toes dip into chilly depths, faint melodic strains, fainter staticky prickles. A big sharp metallic slap to the face, fargh, okay I'm awake, arsehole. One more slap for good measure. Some annoying zealot starts molesting churchbells with far too much haphazard abandon, hard enough to distort perspective. Slow tribal throb booms in the distance, hammering on the hull of some unseen beached vessel, like where in bleeding hells am I? Return of melodic strains and a gradual whitening slide into rougher decrepitudes. The percussion now suddenly staccato, slap-dash, bopping onto tin buckets, the hull heaved into the lake, and then the noise.
Took ten minutes to get there, but it is everything a noise should be. Dense, coarse, raw, ripped, mangled. Straight-laced, heavy-handed, texture study, broken down for a sec or two, shit-flecked chunks gnawed off, sawing away at frazzle-mouthed butt-scrunch before high-pitched acoustic squeaking fleshes out the palate. Squeaking turns to screeching, of the piercing, metal-on-metal, grinding sort, until a surprising twitter of birdsong bursts from the overgrowth, hefty distortions ground down, batted away, or possibly buried, unceremoniously, at sea.
Ligature's got three tracks to his side. "Observance" a densely wooded convergence of knobbed and knobbly wrinkle and choked, throat-fisted, crinkle. Sudden fade before the first minute and a deep, woozy, bass throbs in sluggish time to the tune of fleshy, gristly, meat-strangling textures, crumbling structures drawn into the sludge-worn depths. Can't see no forest, can't see no trees. If there is a lake it is one of them creepy bottomless buggers, with severed torsos occasionally bobbing to the surface. The wooze of sludge conveys a distinctly sickening atmosphere, and if we are anywhere specific it is in the corner on some unsightly factory floor, ghostly flickers of light feeding dull drudgery enough to wear down the sturdiest soul. And suddenly, bobbing out of the murk, what the fuck, poetry? This guy think he's some kinda artist? The words are spare, the female voice intoning with grave formality, once a true repulsion / now a lost transmission / an empty vessel / open your eyes and rest.
"Floodlight" reprises the dark and woozy sick-mosphere, slow percussive clunks over downpitched choral chords, forlorn, forsaken, darkening still deeper to flatlined blackdrone. This time we're ready for the poetry- nice try mofo!- the voice, male, seemingly grinning, the nocturnal animal forever unknowing / the easy target / the only answer / three hours before dawn / the sudden flash / the last procrastination. The flatline acquires edgier disturbances, drifting backmasked cycles, heftier percussive clunks, clanks, whining tones, bells, distortions, the grinning voice, in offering, let you do this to me. Don't mind if I do! answers two solid minutes of solid-state earhole-flooding whiteout. Upper register whines seer the edges, heftier thudgery bashing brains beneath the bludgeoning assault, thick, rich, chocolate-coated, shitstorm, good to the last gulp.
What makes it all, for me, is the ever unsettled tension burbling beneath the undergrowth, as though ripe for rage at any moment. On edge, throughout, the edginess never really dissolves. This goes for both Kjostad and Ligature, though in the latter case I would add "unsettling" to unsettled. One foot in darkness, the other trapped in baleful, unblinking glare, make it stop make it stop make it-
"Cessation" is just that. Mournful funerary keys drawn over crackling records, droning call-answer pocked with crunched out percussive wallops. The darkened bottom echoes in bass-heavy sympathy, acquiring mass, threatening the possibility of full-on harshness that never comes. Fading out, funeral tones, not a poet in earshot, guess whatever he let her do to him worked. Hope someone got it on camera.
edit
fixed.
