Chier — Bliss
Package wise the Bliss set is fairly similar to the projects other two self releases Cabaret Du Neant( from last year) and Nature Morte( from 2015). It features two covers, each inside their own plastic sleeve, with two discs in each sleeve. The A5 sleeves are murky, lo-fi, and decidedly grim affair- featuring blurred, overlaid & black ‘n’ white images of graveyards, coffins, and weird grave stones. It feels very much like it could be an underground black metal release, with the projects logo looking that way too. The four white CDRs feature stamped on project name/ disc number, and a red & black spray paint type effect.
Fitting the releases look each ‘wall’ here is fairly grim, monochrome, and pressingly thick & bleak in it’s unfold. Though many of the tracks are fairly detailed & subtle shifting in their weighty & pressing unfolds. Also there is often a feeling of dense synth based & muffled drone added to proceedings too.
Each of the tracks are simply titled with two roman numerals- one for the disc number, and one for the track number. So starting off proceedings we have “I-I”,
and this opens up a with a deep ‘n’ buzzing synth drone , which seems to drill into your very being. At around the two & a bit minute mark this slowly revolving & swigging static texture slowly rises. And by around the 4th minute it’s settled into a blend of peeling sluggish churning, dense & slurred drone matter, and building skipping ‘n’ jittering sub tone detail- this nicely tightens the feeling of airless brood, to near skull-in-a- vice like levels. Chier creates this very taut & blended feel to the ‘wall’, which almost feels like the texture are dense & crudely muddy liquid that is sluggishly been poured into your ears. Managing to be both extremely blunt & crude yet oddly sophisticated & detailed in its make-up. By the end of the track the ‘wall’ has very subtly & progressively formed into a more rapid & seared blend of tensioned low-end drone, skipping & jittering smaller static detail, and a slight buzzing weighty feed back presences.
Later on with “II-II” we open with an extremely bleak & very amped-up recording equipment haze. With-in around a few minutes this simmer & constantly rolling blend of low-end muffle, jittering yet thin crispness, and growing sub-tone buffering appears. All creating this detailed –yet-extremely stark example of building, subtle layer & developing muffle bound ‘wall-making’.
“III-II” brings together a very tight-yet- tonally defined blend of smaller detail bound ‘wall-making’. It consists of : a slightly hick-upping & muffled crease bound jittering, thinner weaving ‘n’ stitching tonality, and a rising selection of tumbling & loser rumble bound texturing. This ‘wall’ seems to slowly but surely get more populated by subtle texturally addition, creating this feeling akin to a forest that growing & thicken around you.
Throughout the collection there certainly is a distinctly muffled, weather & fairly narrow sonic identity to all the eight tracks. And at times a few do sound a little interchangeable- yet for the most part Chier does manage to imbed each track with it’s only distinct layer make-up.
On the whole Bliss is another creative & fairly original sounding release from Chier, that shows once again he is trying to push & develop what can be done with the wall-noise/ textured based noise & drone genre. I certainly admire & respected what’s on offer here, though personally I can’t say it’s one of my favourite releases by the project. And this due to the often muffled bound & hazed drone like feel of the releases make-up, but this is more down to personal preference. The release came in a edition of ten copies, and as of this review there are some still left.