Musique Machine
Non Ethos

Non EthosSky Asfalt

[Afe Records — 2007]
Reviewed 25 September 2007by Roger Batty
Syk Asfalt takes the listener into a strange wet and grey world, where slowly decaying buildings appear out of rancid fog, black spores trails and growths creep over ever surface and the stagnant air is always heavy with dark threat. And it just carries on rain and raining  with in this world, imagine if Bela Tarr decided to do a grim horror film this is the audio equivalent of it.

The album is built around all manner of wet, sodden, crunching, decaying & crumbling sounds, along with underground groaning of rushing water. Trails of grim ambience appearing ever so often to leak out bleak harmonics, but the main focus  here is on sound texture and not ambience. The tapestry of sound that are taken  in are; grey torrents of grim rain, crunching & crumbing brick work, bellowing dead winds, sluggish sewage and death clog water ways. This feels likes the soundtrack to an eternal dieing planet, which  decays all that go with in its atmosphere from the inside out. Tracks like erosion actually give the feeling that the inside of your head is  been slowly eaten and decayed away- the roof of your mouth melting and collapsing into your throat, as your teeth splash out in the grey puddles that surround you.

A grim, decaying and diseased excise in audio discomfort  which at times you can almost taste and smell it’s rotten core and it’s slow endless crawl to putrefaction.