And The Posters — The Prose Stand

And the Posters' "The Prose Stand" is a cryptic, homemade looking CDr release of lo-fi electronics which range from verbed out drifting soundscapes to grim industrial flavored downtempo.  Every one of the 17 tracks is rather amusingly titled with a different anagram of "And the Posters", some of which are quite creative.

From the irreverent, thrown together packaging, featuring cheaply copied and hastily scribbled non-art, I expected something snarky, anti-musical, and quite likely earsplittingly loud.  However, the music is certainly an earnest, aesthetically driven undertaking with a thick solitary nocturnal atmosphere, tending towards an attitude typical of 'dark ambient', but without so much minimalism or stark emptiness.

The album is 47 minutes, and easily played through.  The sounds are presented collage style, countless short fragments woven into a seamless experience.  Noisy field recordings, static-laden samples recorded from old televisions, and faint obliterated beats are pushed through cold, blatantly artifical mono verbs.  The album is distant, claustrophobic, ghostly, a cassette tape that's gone through the wash, already-drowned music.  This watery surrealist nightmare is comparable to 80's Nurse With Wound, who would certainly share the sense of humor found in the anagram track titles ("Deep Thrant S.O.S.", "Dante the Pross", "Sante's Phredot", "The Top Nerd Ass", et cetera).

This sort of magickal pagan loop music is also not unlike much of the output of the Soleilmoon label.  It certainly sounds no worse for being made in a bedroom, or on a budget.  One might say it adds to the mystery.  The sense of individual ritual is what is important, the channeling of a focused consciousness through the repetition of glistening astral tone.  In the blur of crackling artifacts, a howling, crumpled wind, lies a world that may never be fully discerned.
There are also tracks like "Septon Hard Set", a foray into grimy, sluggish breakbeats recalling Scorn, Muslimgauze or Justin Broadrick's Techno Animal project.  This fits right in with the Soleilmoon comparison, as there's plenty of esoteric ambient breakbeat music on that label as well, with artists such as Transgenic.

I won't give it a perfect rating, because a few times the sound seems sloppily or quickly arranged, and the air of mystery is weakened.  Final track "Rest on the Pads" contains a drum loop which sounds like the kind of canned preset that comes with any keyboard.

This album has a wonderful vibe, and remarkably clever use of limited means.  It is packed to the brim with ideas, showing that dark ambient and drone need not be executed with absurd degrees of minimalism to induce trance states.  And the Posters are worthy to be signed to Soleilmoon or similar label and given the beautiful packaging and artwork their music deserves.