Glory Fckn Sun — Vision Scorched

Glory Fckn Sun is a collaboration between PseudoArcana label boss Anthony Milton, Ben Spiers and Simon O'Rorke. The label description says the band was ”formed in 2003 as a conduit for intense ritualistic sonic exploration" and that "Vision Scorched collects together one studio track and two live pieces. These range through long form rumbling distorted deep space explorations (complete with supernova and the odd blackhole), intense yet ethereal harsh noise to close with a droning metaphysical raga-esque paean to the great cosmic inevitable of the collapse of the sun, And of light itself." How you can hope to intimate the destruction of the solar sytem through improvised noise is beyond me, but the band certainly makes a pretty good go at achieving said goal.

This is some intense, hell-bent noise. It's undeniably difficult to get a handle on who does what, because most of the time, there's a dense overloaded landscape of noise. But if you look into it, it becomes fairly evident that most of the "noise" element is created by distorted guitars, most likely manipulated via some sort of electronics. It doesn't have a clean, computerised, digtal sound, so it may very well be that the electronics are of the analog variety. What is very evident in the mix is Simon O'Rorke's percussion. It's there for aesthetics (of the apocalyptic variety), not for keeping a rhythm for the most part. There are moments when O'Rorke adds some surpisingly jazzy acccents, most evidently on Pitch and Foil, which gives the piece a bit more of a conventional structure than the disc's two other longer tracks. On the first track especially, the 27 minute long Swells, O'Rorke provides some of the strongest, certainly most intense moments of Vision Scorched by wresting a turbulent maelstrom of trebly tumult from his cymbals.

All of this still leaves the question of whether or not the disc is worth listening to on more than one occasion. Yes, it's noisy, that's established. It aims for some lofty goals conceptually. The answer is it does bear repeated listens, depending on the listener's state of mind at the time. There's actually a lot going on in this music which sucks you in if you're brave enough to crank it up, or slap on some headphones and zone out. Though this music isn't meant to be particularly easy, the players approach the music with enough finesse that it easily sidesteps consideration as merely noise for noise's sake. Vision Scorched originally came either with a 72 page picture book of sun related imagery (limited to 200 copies, which is currently sold out at the label), or the CD only version which is housed in a double sided insert with highlights from the book. It took over two years to put Vision Scorched together, and it shows.