Lethe — Inconsequence
The three discs come in a three tray single DVD case, and this features rather spectacular colour pictures of vast autumn hazed woodland scapes. Each CDR also features rather melancholic pictures of orange & red coloured autumn trees & leafs. There’s also two rather grim yet effective quotes from writers Thomas Ligotti & Jack Kerouac inside the sleeve, which nicely tops of the look/feel of the set
Disc one is taken up the 1 hour & 12 minutes of “Hollow Nostalgia”. This truly vast & complete hopeless track is built around a mix of: a brooding distant wind like drone texture, far away rumbling ‘n’ doomy sub-tones , and a buried sew-sawing or warbling mid to lower high pitched texture, and the odd wind-rustle-through-the-forest trees sub-tones. Strand grimly melds these elements together to create a grim ambient soup, where really it’s difficult to define exactly what your listening to. Also it’s recorded at a fairly low level so you have to pull the volume up fairly high to make out what’s going on here. The track stays fairly stagnant through-out most of it’s run-time, apart from the odd more booming tone rise, & the odd subtle shift of the textures patterns. If your in the right mood the track really does put you in a bleak sort of disorientating trance, as you seem to endless bob ‘n’ drift on the morose near undercharging drone soup.
Disc two is taken up by “Vomiting of The Self”, and this comes in at the 1 hour & 6 minute mark. And this track seems even more stark & sparse than the first track, it’s built around: a very buried/ far away warbling tone or howling like judder, and a muffled selection of two maybe three ominous billowing drone textures. This track feels also more disorientating too, and it’s often difficult to make out the full shapes of tones as it your drifting through some sort of shapeless grey haze. Once again very little changes in this tracks vast/ bleak sonic landscape, and there feels like there’s less going on here than the first track, though you still do get the odd booming rise.
Disc Three is taken up by the 1 hour & 10 minutes of “The Weight Of Failure”. This track seems to strip-down & lower the volume even more than the first two tracks, and you really get the feeling from the track that all hope has well & truly gone, and now all you left with it’s grey pained misty monotony. The track is built around just a distant fairly shape-less rumble, and these distant warbling slightly sour ‘n’ semi off- key textures. There is less separation between the tones meaning the track is the audio equivalent of a deep & seemingly endless fog. Also this track doesn’t even have so many sudden booming sub-tones either, it just drifts along seemingly unchanged, ultra bleak, numb, yet oddly taunt in it’s feeling….. like something deep, deep down in the track is trying to escape with it’s last bit of energy, yet it never does. .
Over its three very lengthy discs "Inconsequence" offers up some of the most bleak, stark & disorientating drone matter you’re likely to have come across. It’s definitely not a release for everyone, and it’s also a release very much for a certainly introspective & depressed mood. But if you enjoy truly hopeless drone/ ambient matter, and you up for a challenge this is well worth your time & effort.