See bottom of this post for digest commentary.Chris Goudreau – Further Fields, Or CloseYou'd be right in expecting a departure from harsh electronic purity when
SICKNESS spreads under his own name. You may also expect the familiar symptoms: angular dynamics, exacting precision, meticulous detail, constant movement, practiced attention to pacing and flow. And there you'd be right again. This three-part digital-only brevity was created for AMPLIFY 2020 out of
remnants, partials, and leavings from field recordings gathered since quarantine and represents the fourth release under the name but only the second belonging exclusively to the studio. In the studio the departure from the celebrated SICKisms is more clear cut, every bit as infectious, but, just....
not so fiercely now.
Opener
Further is perhaps the furthest yet from the fiercely finessed cuts and chops honed over the better part of two decades. Or to say, the cuts and chops are there, but de-harshed in the service of disembodied industrial strength atmosphere, as though culled from late night sorties at a haunted warehouse or dockyard. Garbled snatches of voice accelerate ghost-like around shadowy corridors, flitting in between fuller bodied rumbles, snatched huffs of deep-sunk bellows, boiler room steam hiss, dampened washes of blackened gasp, wooden thunk, choked whisper. At the crystalline peaks, the jarring bite of scrap metal in clattered collapse, never to the fore, always fading back in spectral spirals. A possibly obscure comparison, and perhaps to earn in your sometimes faithful narrator a righteous hoof to the jewels, but in the hallucinated afterburn the caustic concrete considerations might dare to suggest deftly spliced highlights from
Illusion of Safety's
From Nothing To Less.
A loud bang announces the centerpiece, whose expansive
Fields leave any suggestion of the above comparison at some further remove (and with any luck to save the prized jewels from further malignment). Haunted warehouse disembodiments continue to invade the space, but so too a number of electronic buzzings, wheedlings, grumblings, heftier burls of field-molested huffs and chaffs dodging the occasional dull hammer or ringing clang. The majority of these tends to come straight at you without warning, singularly smithied caustics conspiring to unsettle attentions among their more abruptly finessed snips and slashes. The restless, often variable pacing, broadened textural palette and myriad hard-panned crescendos compete as readily to disorient as to invite fruitless quest to resolve the many and bruising stresses. On this occasion, the stresses are often meted out with some percussive force, the rough angling of each successive cut delivered in pointedly sharp dynamic contrast to net a jarring series of never-relenting bangs n thuds, razor'd staccato thwacking and smacking upside the backside down the back end thrown sideways round the bend, over and back again. If you catch my drift.
A lot of the textures here are very raw and organic, much in line with the gnarled thatch of cover art, roughly terrained fields through which to drag yr filthy carcass. Evidently a heavy sort of carcass at that, the dragging an episodic lurching, from field to field, never really harried but never keen to stick around, as though flipping through an industrial-strength pastoral picture book, lingering a few moments to dwell on the ambient afterimages, skipping quickly over the less absorbing gestures, sometimes knocking things off the tree stump and straight into the dirt in the process. Just in case you weren't paying attention, stop-motion drags of grimy bass gulpage freeze frame, then off we go again, reversing upside-down through quick-spliced snapshots of screaming visages trapped in this heaving and jerking hall of mirrors. As the fields near their climax, the space between each cut narrows...closer, closer still...accelerating straight up to legit frenetic pacing that starts to wear just that dab SICK on the palate.
Closer
or Close tightens the cuts into frantic jittery pincer-stabs, popping up from densely fogged, slow-grubbing, undergrowth and scampering in excited insectile fevers across the almost frozen tundra before dipping back again below the surface. The rare owl-call or singular echo sometimes startles the chattering fits, as though to remind the listener that someone has in fact been tasked with bringing this to earhole, and meanwhile the grumbling groundswells of subsurface rumble-huff steadily hold the fort. For the most part, however, them pesky ill-mannered buggers keep popping up again and again, quick-spliced snap, rattle, clack, pinching and scratching sickeningly against the earhole, tight-packed slivers of razor-wire caught in a mad, scrabbling, death-jig.
Still itching to contract some
SICKNESS? Look no further than
Close until Further, a sweet little bonus goodie available via the prime mover's
bandcamp. This picks up where the album proper leaves off, mad scrabbling cuts compiling pretty much the entire album's worth of material into three minutes of straight fire. So I suppose, if you weren't afraid of sounding like a complete dick, you could call this SICKNESS Plays Chris Goudreau. SICKNESS plays the full Chris Goudreau medley here, tightening the screws tighter still, closing the gaps between the cuts to the point of non-existence, close, closer, closest! In other words, if everything in the piece sounds exceedingly familiar it's because you've just heard it. Only, het up to breakspine velocity, herking, jerking, lurching and jacking your ass all over the goddamn place. Because, like, it can. Now, if violently shoved into a corner and forced to choose a hole, I might indicate preference for this stuff when it's laid bare for less frenzied introspection, to bliss up the relatively restful sublimations in myriad texture. No chance for that here. Stutter-blasted jerkout fits of frantic epileptic fuckfrenzy, rough-angled jump-cuts ramped with illiberally sprinkled spasms of distorted scrinch-scrape, razor'd staccato thwacking and smacking upside the backside down the back end thrown sideways round the bend in a dizzying hall of mirrored lurch 'n heave-ho, out with chunks, thar she blows. Just, sick.
Digest spewThe second studio-specific sortie for the SICK One under his own name collects fields flung furthest yet from the fiercely finessed cuts and chops honed over the better part of two decades. Here the cuts and chops are studiously de-harshed in the service of disembodied industrial strength atmos, garbled snatches of voice accelerating backward around shadowy corridors, flitting in between fuller bodied rumbles, snatched huffs of deep-sunk bellows, boiler room steam hiss, dampened washes of blackened gasp setting off gnarled fields of raw, organic, texture, collapsed metals disappearing in spectral spirals. The restless, often variable pacing, broad textural palette and myriad hard-panned crescendos compete to disorient, the rough angling of each successive cut delivered in pointedly sharp dynamic contrast. Linger in one field, lurch to the next, bliss up the sickless sublimations in myriad texture. Then, it gets SICK.
