(Clicka qua per la versione Italiana)
French post-rockers
Aluk Todolo
assembled an unpredictable parade of industrial and post-rock events on
Descension (Public Guilt, 2007), containing four lengthy instrumental
suites.
Obedience
opens with distorted cavernous drones and slow pounding metallic beats
like a warped, slow-motion version of Neu's "motorik" locomotives. Suddenly
female voices start screaming and instruments start banging and vibrating
at an extremely loud volume, a violent collective fit of vintage
Japanese noisecore.
Terrifying layers of distortion pile up on top of a primordial drumbeat.
The piece sigues into Burial Ground, a calmer, hypnotic Pink Floyd-ian
concentrate of psychedelic suspense. Dissonant vibratoes of a stringed
instrument interfere with the lulling guitar patterns and eventually
decay into Echoes-like pings.
The drones return like a glacial wind to blanket
Woodchurch, slowly morphing over an anemic industrial pulsation.
An infernal guitar distortion emerges from that swampy jam and propels
Disease into a more aggressive rhythmic pattern, an android-like
cavalcade reminiscent of Chrome's sci-fi fantasies.
The first and the fourth pieces are breathtaking. Too bad that the two in
the middle do not sustain the intensity.
The piece of the EP Ordre (Ajna) was recorded during the same sessions.
The drummer and the bassist also played in Diamatregon. They also formed
the Gunslingers with guitarist and vocalist Greg Raimo.
The Gunslingers unleashed a mayhem of rhythm and noise on
No More Invention (2008) and
Manifesto Zero (World In Sound, 2010), somewhere between
the most frenzied no-wave and the most cerebral prog-rock.
Gregory Raimo's solo project GR & Full-Blown Expansion debuted with
GR & Full-Blown Expansion (World Sound, 2010), an equally challenging
slab of noise-rock, notably the
12-minute Descent Along The An-Ti-Fohn-Nul.
Aluk Todolo then released
Finsternis (Utech Records, 2009).
Premier Contact adopts a more fragile and ominous stance. It segues into
the equally anemic Deuxieme Contact, that increases the dose of
suspense via languid guitar glissando, but still very little happens.
After the relatively brief Totalit‚, which is a bubbling tumor of
musique concrete, TroisiŠme Contact increases both the speed and the
noise, but then languishes in faceless depression being carved by a steady beat.
Quatrieme Contact continues in the frosty and sterile plodding, although
it mutates into something more humane and atmospheric. Too little too late.
Diamatregon played old-fashioned (i.e. hysterical) black-metal on
The Satanic Devotion (2000) and
Blasphemy For Satan (DMG, 2002), and returned with
Crossroad (2008 - tUMULt, 2010).
Aluk Todolo's double-disc Occult Rock (Ajna Offensive, 2012)
contains eight untitled mid-length jams (about ten minutes each) that range
from the frenzied black-metal orgy of the first piece (ten minutes of
indiscriminate hysterical drumming and strumming)
to the absolute panzer horror doom of the eight,
from the brainy cryptic post-rock meditation of the third
to the syncopated Neu-ian motorik neurosis of the seventh.
The slow distorted agony of the fifth evokes a series of variations on
the riff of the Trogg's Wild Thing.
Not all the pieces are so monolithic:
the second piece pares the languid psychedelic distorted guitar lament with a
busy suspense-filled rhythm merging them into a breathless devilish dance;
the brooding cosmic crescendo of the fifth yields to a ringing earthly hymn;
and the sixth even entertains moments of quiet.
The whole constitutes an inspired synthesis of musical types that expands way
beyond the metal genre.
Aluk Todolo's Voix (Norma Evangelium Diaboli, 2016) continued their
organic growth away from their metal childhood. The album is generally more
restless and tense.
The mix of cyclical drumming,
Jimi Hendrix-ian guitar glissandoes
and jazzy bass lines in A1 is both dark and kinetic, and occasionally
plunges into
Sonic Youth-esque repetitive dissonance.
Very fast arpeggios create a mood of extreme tension
in A2.
The short B2 is a
crescendo to jarring swirling repetitive music that sounds like
Glenn Branca composing gypsy music.
The atmospheric highlights are actually the least hysterical:
the sparse jazzy landscape of B1, populated with
subtle drumming and ghostly floating noises; and B3, that starts like a
jazz-rock version of
Godspeed You Black Emperor
and ends as hypnotic cosmic stoned music after an orgasmic crescendo.
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