Cory Strand — A Very Dark Place
If you’ve only ever dipped your toe in the wall-noise/ drone underground you’ll be aware of Cory Strand- this Minneapolis based noise/bleak mood-maker has been creating work since around 2012, under his own name & project names such as Lethe, Dejection, Fantome De Sang and more recently under the banner of Eugene Critchley. Strand has released a truly staggering amount of material- going from multi-disc drone & wall reinterpretations of film soundtracks, onto black-metal focused noise craft, though to numbing ambience, onto to synth soundtrack, and beyond.
For this CDR the sound is very much in the barren & bleak drone-meets- dramatic/ edgy film dialogue of his Eugene Critchley project, but with the addition of short atmospheric electronica moments. In all, we have five tracks here, and each of these falls between thirteen & twenty-minute mark. The dialogue samples move from (what sounds like) a Bill Murray film, where he’s either playing a principle/ manager. To a series of interactions between a male, his work partner, and a female- the voice of the male sounds like possible Seth Rogen or Danny McBride, though it could be someone else…anyway, these inactions going from sudden rages, onto put downs & amusing bickering. These are blended in with the lengthy masses of stark & harmony lacking drone making- these see a mixture of buffeting & battering lo-ends, & rattling bleak mids. Each drone journey uses a fairly similar selection of blunt drone textures, though there are some slight variation between each.
The electronica elements, when they appear go from dark beat-bound mood-scaping, onto semi-industrial moments, through to more incidental music. I guess they add something to the whole thing, though they are fairly short.
On the whole, I felt A Very Dark Place is very much covering the same ground as Strand's work with Eugene Critchley- so I'm not really sure why he put it out under his own name. Much like Eugene Critchley releases, I think you really need to get something from or recognize the often prolong dialogue samples been used here- and I’m afraid I neither knew, or found the samples effective- but that’s purely from a personal point of view…really in conclusion it’s simple if you like Eugene Critchley, you’ll like this, if not maybe better trying something else from Strands truly huge discography. I wanted to give this release two & a half- but as we only do whole points I’ve gone for two instead