House of low culture — Edward's lament!
So Edward laments… But who is he and what for is he lamenting? On the Neurot website, it is written that it might be, but might as well not be, Edward Jessup. Jessup is the main character of Altered Sates, a film directed by controversial film-maker Ken Russell. Jessup studies the biology of schizophrenia and lead some sensory-deprivation experiments on human subjects. His main theory: there is a direct link between the manifestations of mental illness and religious states of consciousness. He hears about a drug that induces religious visions and tries it himself. It reveals long forgotten primal instincts. Those familiar with Russell’s filmography will understand how mouth watering this film is (if they havn’t seen it yet).
Ok so we might have found our Edward. But what does it tell us about the music? Well, well, well… The overall vibe fits perfectly to the plot of Altered States. And although I’m not quite sure there is anything primal about this album, it is actually powerful enough for you to feel something in your guts, to awake something that was buried deep inside of you, something that you weren’t quite aware of. Maybe one could say it’s something primitive, but it might as well be something completely different.
I’d personally relate Edward’s lament! to Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of the leaves. For some reasons, I can not dissociate this music to the pages about the exploration of the house, of those rooms that grow over the course of a few seconds and lead you deeper underground that you would think possible. As much as the said rooms, the music can be very intimate and the next second expand and sound as if it had been recorded in a huge cathedral, or a cave so big that it goes to the core of the planet.
And since it seems that I have to say a few words on the music in itself… I said HOLC was ambient. It certainly is. Creepy soundscapes. I know creepy is used quite often (or rather misused), but if there ever was one album that this word could fit to, it has to be Edward’s lament. Most tracks feature guitar drones and a lot of different effects, sometimes very minimal, other times more elaborate. On a couple of tracks, you can hear a more distinctly traditional kind of guitar (electric and acoustic) playing, but it doesn’t do any harm to the feeling of misery that this music creates.
An endless fall into the void. A desolated landscape. A place where nothing lives. A man alone, sole survivor. Mourning mankind. Utterly compelling. Utterly disengaging. An absence of words, logos disappeared. A primal scream?