A View From Nihil — Triumph Of The Broken Will
I’ll have to admit the past work I’d heard from Irish HNW act A View From Nihil has been a little mixed in quality, bleak focus & hypnotic vibe; but ‘Triumph Of The Broken Will’ is simply awe inspiringly nasty & grimly sounding fresh take on wall making. There’s a very English feeling of anger, hate & hopeless running through the whole album with whiffs & sears of doom, punk & barren industrial tone appearing with-in the tracks ultra bleak & hope smothering bass drones. On offer here are three untitled & length tracks that fall between twelve minutes & twenty four minutes mark apiece.
First-up we have ‘untitled one’ which comes into nasty life with this thick, muffled & tar black bass fluctuations that are revolved & re-knited into each other to make this deeply claustrophobic & airless feel. With-in a few minutes grey juddering offshoot of static tone are break off from the grim bass fluctuations & slowly but surely building into an impenetrable and very caustically black wall of noise tone. As the track progresses it just seems to get thicker, more suffocation & hope suck in its feel & you can almost imagine all light been snuffed out around you( I wouldn’t advise playing this in the dark through as I can imagine it could induce panic & total hopelessness). Through the wall just gets thick & thick with it’s fairly rapid rolling black carpet of static you can always just make-out the slow death toll ‘n' throb of the bass just beneath the surface(through it does become more & more hard to make out it’s dieing gasps as the wall of static surrounds & soaks in more) . Truly the tracks an inspired & total bleak opening wall of sound.
Up next of course we have ‘untitled two’ which comes in a lot more urgent & tense than the first track with it’s attack with this muffled tightly looped roving bass drone. By the minute & a half mark a looped electro drilling ‘n’ feed-back tone has being added to the tense drone & things start to get thick & more nihilistic, stern & nasty in their tone. The track brings to mind naked bodies been torture with electric currents on bare metal beds in strake white neo lit decaying rooms…think of some of the scenes from Jess Franco’s bleak & grim 1970’s women’s prison sleaze epic ‘ Barewire Dolls’ and you’ll be close to what I mean. As the track goes on the pace seems to speed- up & tense-up with the bass tone & barren electro drill attack you in a nasty & unforgiving manner. There are no great textural changers with-in the track it just keeps ramming it’s pained & insistent bleak sonic vision on & on. The end of the track returns to grim yet urgent & stripped bass drone as the track fades out.
Lastly we have ‘Untitled three’ which finds an active stale air cutting, then flesh slicing aggressive bass hack & noise roar joining together in a slowly accelerating & thicken wall of sound which feels like your on a decaying & unsafe fairground ride that just seems to be getting faster & faster. As the track goes on the stark bass hum & noise tone become one drill barren & hope draining dart that just keeps hitting your flayling psyche again & again with stern & unforgiving repetition, This is really teeth gritting harsh & bleack stuff that just seems to get more pressing, intense & vein popping hopeless as it rages & speeds along on its cruel, heartless & sadistic route. There’s a real feeling of 2nd wave early 1980’s nihilistic uk punk mixed in with original industrial nihilism- there's zero hope or salvation here. Truly this is one of the most unforgiving, violent & humanity hating slices of ‘wall’ making you’ll every have heard & it tops off this grim & ultra nihilistic HNW masterpiece in fine & nasty form.
The stark, simply yet highly effective black & white cover artwork of three overlaid black blocks fits the tone perfectly and once more nods back to 2nd wave early 1980’s nihilistic uk punk artwork. As does the grim HNW manifest inside the enclosed booklet which ends with the paragraph “The Harsh Noise Wall is the soundtrack to our spiritually vacuous and culturally bankrupt age. There is no struggle here. There is no spirit. No personality. No society. There is nowhere else to go. Nowhere to progress. This is the end product. This is the end.”…very fitting indeed.
Simply put ‘Triumph Of The Broken Will’ is an extreme excise in unforgiving, ultra nihilistic & cruel noise making. It’s certainly the first masterpiece to be created by the Irish/British HNW scene & one of the most harrowing & hope crushing examples of the genre worldwide thus far. To find out more & buy direct drop into the labels blog here.