Dosis Letalis — Crackling Worship
The release is a compilation, or perhaps anthology, of the four interlinked releases that come under the "Crackling" banner from the project: the eponymous Crackling Worship spread across the first two discs, Crackling Terror, Crackling Curse and finally Crackling Madness. They read like they are five stages of grief but transposed to some kind of static wall noise syndrome - a 'condition' the artist has clearly grappled with for some time now! The artwork, as with every other release on the label, is considered and well-executed - evoking the 'crackling aesthetic' with sparse and minimal imagery of 'cracked' textures, there is something to be said for the lack of 'potent images' here, with ambiguity leaving much to the imagination of the listener, something which foreshadows the experience of listening to the release itself.
Crackling Worship is split into eight parts across those two discs - four parts to each disc. The first installment begins with a lusciously crisp and rain-like pattern that continues with a very organic ebbing and flowing throughout its half-hour runtime. Alongside the fifth installment, it is the only track not 'split' into two parts - as is the case with the second through to fourth. Where this first one is a half-hour, the next is forty split into two twenty-minute tracks, the third is twenty split into two ten minute tracks, the fourth is twenty-four split into two twelve minute tracks and the last is twenty-five minutes. Altogether, the splitting and then splitting again serves to perhaps slightly confuse the listener - and it can be hard to discern the role and function of some of the splitting. The tracks are presented on CD's which could have easily had CD-specific edits where the installments cut into parts could be re-stitched together to be 'presented in their entirety' in this special edition where they are able to. However, it seems here the artist wanted to keep these 'breaks', perhaps believing they make the walls more 'digestible' to listeners - keeping them more attentive to where they are in the release rather than letting them entirely zone out for the breadth of the CD-worth of walls.
It is interesting to note here that I continue to use the term 'walls', and I do so whereby I refer to the 'ambient noise wall' - that is, these are evocations of static minimalism as much as harsh noise wall is, but the blaring, maximal and distorted quality of HNW is distilled into a quieter form. I like to think of ANW as a 'cousin' to HNW, more influenced by field recording than HNW is (if this were somehow possible) and with more attention paid to the delicate textures that static noise can produce whilst staying true to the minimalism of 'wall'.
Where the first part of Crackling Worship was crisp and rain-like and had a very organic flow to it, the second installment's first part breaks us into a slightly 'squelchier' patter that nonetheless continues to evoke the steady and hypnotic sound of rainfall. Specifically, though, the wall here is subdued and it is as though we are listening to rainfall upon particular objects - where some rain falls directly to roof, floor, concrete, puddle - others fall to objects that they run off of and then drip down from, causing a subtle difference in the otherwise monotonous continuity of the sound. As I had perhaps alluded to above, the second part to this second installment is essentially a direct continuation, with no clear reasoning behind the split being made except to perhaps accommodate some other format or medium that the walls previously appeared in. It feels unnecessary here but perhaps holding on to some authenticity, presenting them in this compendium of sorts in the way they were originally done for this sake alone.
Opening the third installment of Crackling Worship, the smallest walls of the release are presented together here, both clocking in at ten minutes in length - with the listener keenly expecting no obvious change across parts as has been the case in the prior installment. The wall here is decidedly quieter, with much less high-end vinyl-like crackle, a sparser pattern at an almost 'crawling' pace worms its way very slowly into the listener's brain. As it proceeds it becomes deliciously hypnotic, the slow pace removes all prior sense of 'rain-like' qualities and instead replaces this with something somewhat more abstract - I personally imagine the microscopic, as though this might be close to the sound that tiny threads make as they snap if you were to properly amplify them - or even still, the unpredictable vaunting of thawing ice. It is undeniable that across this entire release the walls never fail to evoke this particular 'field' imagery - always providing the listener with some basis in reality, however abstract the sounds become. The artist has also expressed an interest, both past, and present, in the phenomenon of ASMR (Automatic Sensory Meridian Response) and how this could, or even should intersect with noise and wall noise in particular. It is clear to see from these supremely soothing walls, with this third installment in my estimation one of the most soothing, how ties might be formed between the two - and how those who experience ASMR might do so listening to both HNW and ANW. Opening the second part to this third installment the listener stands correct in assuming the 'break' between two parts serves little purpose - moving forward through this release I continue to make this assumption, that they are presented this way out of some sentiment towards retaining authenticity.
The fourth installment opens much like the third, but where the third approached silence in its sparsity so closely, the fourth recedes with some additional layers of static curling around the still-sparse patter. Three distinct and delicate layers intertwine and snake around each other, with a very interesting balance between the highs and mids - as with all prior tracks, the low-end is somewhat absent. Where there is much ANW that presents a heavy bass rumble that still manages to close on 'ambience' as opposed to 'harshness', the very nature of 'crackling' is emphasized throughout this release through this lack of bass and low-end presence. While some 'crackling' serves the listener beautifully well when it appears in conjunction with a hypnotically overpowering ambient bass hum that churns powerfully, aiding it in many ways, these crackling excursions are crackling for the sake of itself and as such they must be presented upon a backdrop of total lack, that is silence, as opposed to the usual culprits of the HNW such as the churn-and-grind power-ride bass whir. As we progress through this wall, not much longer than the last two, clocking in at twelve instead of ten minutes, the sparsity of the pace continues to elude the listeners grasp at something predictable - instead of encouraging the listener to form patterns of their own. The result is an utterly hypnotic journey through 'micro-sound' that causes the listener to experience trance-like immersion heavily - and in my own personal opinion - in a much stronger and more definite way than is possible through the most run of the mill HNW.
The fifth and final installment of Crackling Worship laps on several more layers than the prior walls and returns to a similar place we were at in the beginning with the first installment. More constant and searing mids climb in and scrape across the more sparse blips and splutters, never allowing a backdrop of silence to re-emerge - in effect hiding and de-emphasizing these intricacies, they now have to be selectively sought out by the listener or able to overpower the forceful spread, soaring over the radio-like static whir like static objects careening out of orbit and burning up in the empty vacuum surrounds. It feels like a good, comfortable and narrative way to close the 'Worship' fragment, and it makes me think about the artistic decision to present this fragment to the series first. Was it presented first simply because this was the first made? It's very possible. But perhaps there was a further consideration, perhaps these minimal static excursions represent the artists initial and burgeoning explorations of the sound not only in that they were the earliest but they were in a way catalysts for those that would proceed.
Moving onto the third disc we have the 'Crackling Terror' chapter, split across two parts both clocking in at a half-hour. An initial static 'gulp' pushes against us and then splutters - stopping and starting like someone flicking through radio channels. I'm driven to linking up the sound in my head with the kind of sonic barrage experienced in 'cut-up' noise, although as the stammering static persists there is a markedly 'ambient' quality that begins to take hold and serves to unite this disc with the others. The pace of said stammering is consistently erratic across the run-time, at some point the brain shuts off trying to discern a pattern and most likely forms its own - allowing this otherwise jarring, slashing cut-up sound to win over and induce immersion as much as its brethren do. As was to be expected, the break between parts one and two may as well have been a recorded silence pairing up the parts into one long hour-long wall, with no obvious difference between parts initially. In my own experience, however, I'm drawn increasingly to believe that there was some change in parameters that took place across the length of this wall in two parts, and that the change did occur at this middle intersection. It's hard to say if I didn't just imagine this, as with the common-place phenomenon of auditory hallucination listening to HNW. It is interesting to think that this 'Terror' manages to avoid being overbearingly ambient or harsh, instead of operating in some kind of middle-ground that connects the two and serves to illustrate how HNW and ANW could be related for all their differences.
Crackling Curse really ramps things up a bit - the intermittent sparsity is abandoned for a fast-paced 'wash' of bubbling, snapping, and of course, crackling highs and mids that careen and spill all over the place. The 'rain-like' quality is at first absent but as the wall persists we begin to hear some of it return, where previously the quality was very clearly in our heads as 'that part of the storm where the pelting has let up but the rain continues slowly', what we hear here is easily likened to the abrasive 'full brunt of the storm' where the rain falls so heavily that there is no chance of determining small intricacies like the dripping and falling of rainfall on particular objects, across particular distances, and so on. This installment brings us the closest to HNW that the release has brought us thus far - it would be very easy to take these walls, throw on some gain and arrive back at 'HNW proper', something that couldn't be said for much else on the release. Just as with the prior installments, though, there is a significant lack of low-end, and where the low-end does crop up it supplies its own form of subtlety - the occasional thud, gulp or blip mounts the striding, cloud of torrential static in the same way sinewy crackling high-end would often mount low-end rumble. This reversal is interesting and kept me engaged throughout much of the short run-time of each part to this installment, although I did eventually relent and give in to immersion, as it was fairly hard not to do so across all installments of the release (with perhaps Crackling Terror the easiest among all).
The final installment, 'Crackling Madness', jumps from one extreme to another - where we were presented with ANW closing dangerously close to HNW in Crackling Curse, this final excursion - a wall presented all in one track across the one disc for the first and only time in the release - is super-minimal. Silence fills the bulk of the track, with an extremely slow layer of snapping and popping crackle, much like that of vinyl records, lathered across the hour. The listener is invited to engage in 'close listening' here more than ever - the subtleties and differences present in the slight, sinewy crackles is at times easy and at other times hard to discern, remaining somewhat unpredictable throughout. It is quite hard to find truly 'trance-like' immersion here for all the silence - something that gives the listener too much 'space' to really 'get lost' as you would in the static immersion of HNW. Instead, we are given the opportunity of an altogether different kind of immersion, where the trance is replaced with something a little more active. In my own personal experience, the slightness of the crackling here is relaxation incarnate.
In closing, it is interesting to note that perusing the releases on the project Bandcamp page, we can find multiple 'new edits' and new versions of the same walls replacing their original counterparts. Crackling Terror describes the original tracks from October 2016 being replaced by new versions in December 2017, Crackling Worship presents a shortened version of the first installment and longer versions of the fourth installment parts, Crackling Curse only presents us with the first two of four parts. Finally, Crackling Madness is the same version as appears on the release but with a small note describing how this is a new version of 2017 specifically replacing the 2016 version in pre-empting to this physical release. It is through noticing this more than anything else that it becomes clear that the artist did indeed make further considerations towards all of these releases when compiling them for presentation together under one set. It's interesting to think that there perhaps only a select few who managed to download the original versions of these walls as they first appeared, digitally, who are able to make comparisons between the two and draw conclusions about the purpose for these edits. Personally, I have to salute Nemanja for paying such close attention to how he intends walls to appear - and how changes need to be made not only to 'fit the format' but for the release to remain cohesive and 'as artistically intended' and I think there are not enough artists working in HNW, Static Minimalism and adjacent fields who make these considerations and produce multiple versions, edits and remixes of the same walls as it is certainly something that produces good results in the long-run. With that said, I know I may be preaching to the choir when it comes to advocating for the recycling of material within HNW, but this is not exactly what I'm saying - I do advocate for such and know that there are plenty of artists already doing this, but I am specifically saying here that more artists should follow in the footsteps of Dosis Letalis specifically when it comes to 're-envisioning' existing work for the benefit of representation.
All in all, this release is a compendium that brings together a series of minimal static excursions that I absolutely love - all of them leaving me in a perfectly blissful static hypnosis. I have come to know, love and understand the mania of Crackling Worship and I am looking forward to future iterations from both this project and others. I watched each of these releases come out in succession before there was a hint of them being compiled in this way and I am extremely happy that they did - as I would await each installment of the series eagerly. Dosis Letalis is continuing to make interesting explorations - both in the Crackling Realm, the realm of the lowercase, the ANW, and the HNW - the project is definitely one to watch when it comes to traversing a broad noise palette and coming up with interesting couplings in splits and collaborations. As of writing, the label still has copies available in stock (according to their Storenvy) and I would recommend grabbing one while they're still around!