Kiran Arora – Formication
Ever wake up in the middle of the night to find a cockroach crawling all over your face? Only to find that the one is not just one, but several? Dozens? Hundreds? A full and fevered cockroach clusterfuck? Now, you too can share in the experience. In the dawning metamorphosis between fever dream and waking horror, in the altered state that splits mind and body, in the nebulous shift of perspective: animal to insect to flattened, twitching, bits. In the uncertain spatial distribution a kafkaesque clusterfuck of possibility. In the distance, cockroach clusters of seismic proportion, massed and thundering, blotting out the sky. In the up close and personal, hordes of mindless insectile excrescence, pricking, poking, slipping, slurping. Slipping through the cracks, in the 'holes, up the crack, down the hole, slam dunks, regurgitated chunks, gulp, glug. Fucking disgusting.
Dead silence. Ho-hum room ambience. Yawn. Stretch. Like, when's this thing gonna get gowwweern? Eh? Prrdint? Yi sy sm-thig? Quite the nice build, of tension. Slow, stealth-like. Classic, classy. The empty amplified space filling up with more. More empty amplified space. But a louder kind of empty amplified space. Which come to think of it weren't so empty after all. As Eldritch Gears creak into motion the subtle gradations of form 'n essence expand, filling the 'holes to their capacities, and beyond. By the halfway point realization dawns that we are in a full and proper raging of full and bodied thunder bludger. Thunderous bludgering essence, and, not to put too fine a point on it, HARSH. This HARSH continues for a good minute or so, before the machine cuts out, leaving the room with extended pud flubbering session of low key farting around. Very guts churning bottom ended pub flubbering farting around. Man vs stubborn machine, eldritch gears frozen in place refusing to budge, irreplaceable parts sputtering in the silent intervals. But persistence has its rewards. The pud flubbering farting around soon droops into looped low end oscillation, set off with acoustic clicks, presumably the attaching of the Nerve Clamps.
Then the fucker turns on the machine and it's like, like, li-iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii. Nerves set on fire, twitching uncontrollably in fever-wracked red zone convulsions. This is it. The formication. Super charged particles attacking exposed nerve endings, biting, tearing, clawing. Chattering insectile hordes swarming over blistered skin surface, surging in concert like some DENSE, cyclonic, mass. Yet even at its most monolithic and wall-like the thrashing core is palpable, rippling beneath sinewy carapace. This feels alive, bloody, breathing, a constant sense of forward motion driving each fresh 'n fleshly drilling intrusion. Here is the essence around which the album, en masse, spirals. Heavy, meaty, full-flavored, sufficient in overloaded capacities as to provide the 'holes, and speakers, a good and proper workout, shaking the foundations to their core, never really content to bask in the almighty thunder, continuously seeking new heights to conquer, new depths to plunge.
Quick plunge, now, through the Descent Sphincter, to deep and echoing recesses, dark cumulonimbus accretions clouding out the particulars. At the three minute mark, sudden pinched pressures feed claustrophobic panic, big ol' arse stuck in a particularly narrow passage. Then the fits of frenzied seizure, claws, pincers and other sharpened protuberance taking steely knife-scrape to burly unyielding thunder wall. A last ditch scrape-scrap fields hosts of more cumbersome machinery, slamming heavy and hard, and seemingly making progress, graphite dissolving into crumbling bits as determinedly gritty drill-action hollows out the an increasingly rickety foundation. Freedom beckons, craggy surfaces progressively smoothen out to a higher-ended chromium scour.
Only, to judge from the follow-up track, to have the whole thundering bludger-wall collapse, completely squooshing our poor pudgy hero flat, tiny twitching bits crackling in the near frozen bedrock. The oversize drill-bit now appears to be aimed at the prefrontal lobe, repetitive ripping textures progressively worming their way through the increasingly fragmented cranial surface, ripping apart, torn, broken, shattered. Soon, the prescribed Drill Therapy reaches its inevitable denouement, high-end static particles sizzling among liquefied remnants of flabby brain tissue slowly draining out the hollowed chamber, subdued acoustic elements flushing into perspective. The final procedure calls for more sensitive instruments, plastic-coated drill bits, or scrabbling cockroach hooked to a length of wire, quiet explorations making contact with a pair of tonsils fighting the gag reflex.
Finally, the tonsillar explorations are subject to steadily increasing amplification, heavier bulging protuberance digging into the soft tissue. Then the fucker turns on the machine, and the inevitable unloading of the insectile horde. Their entry is as painstaking as it is exacting. Huffs and gasps meet regulated electro-blurt, ill-voiced horror-wheeze fighting each incursion ever deeper into encroaching sphinct-crunch. Clawing, scrabbling, pinching, biting. Running Rife over exposed skin surfaces, drilling into every available crevice, or suggesting the possibility of new crevices where needed. Eventually the scuttling wriggling feeding frenzy reaches a sibilant liquefied consistency, eyes rolled back, final moments drawn out in whitened frieze of drooling sputter-hiss. Fucking disgusting.
Digest spew:
Full-flavored multi-textural crunch-floods caught in the uncertain metamorphosis between monolithic harshwalls and superdense spasti-particles, ripping the whole apart from the center-out. Scrabbling, clambering acousti-flits scampering across flatulent whole-flesh surfaces, fur clad venus winking in and out of frame. In the altered state, perspective shifts, splits, caught now in a kafkaesque regurgitation of big angry pink things, monstrous vermin willing red-hot scorching heat on the teeny insectile frame. Love the smell of neurons frying the morning.
