Red Cliffs — Communion Is A Sacred Word
The album is composed of six compositions split equally across each side of the cassette. The tape is out on the ever-amazing Gerauschmanufaktur label, run by Jan, and as per usual he has taken up the aesthetic production of this release. The artwork and presentation of this tape are particularly beautiful, even in the context of the label catalogue as opposed to generally speaking. Jan's continued dedication to forming a complex and idiosyncratic label aesthetic that somehow manages to remain true to the individual artists vision shows no signs of letting up in his latest batch of releases, although this tape is actually from an older batch having been released in July 2017, with the album being credited as composed over a two-year span from 2016 to the year of release.
The release opens with 'A Void Of Thought', one of the two smaller compositions on the album. Shining synthetic strings glissen eerily over softly pressed, muted notes treading a careful, delicate and simple melody. A blurred, incoherent vocal sample cuts across - slowly coherence is delivered in parcel pieces. There is something deliciously ethereal about it all, components of the track glide into one another - in equal parts muffled and distinctive. The note takes the winding melody to new places with a fast-paced movement, as would be expected of a track under the three-minute margin - everything comes to a close somewhat suddenly and feverishly - there is something beautifully dream-like to this kind of opening.
Second in, we have 'Adolescence Ends With Perception' - the same synthetic strings brace us, with a somewhat more ominous tone, and reverb-heavy thudding industrial drumming brews to a head beneath its wells. The listener is drowned in slowly crawling pools of sound, samples that bob upwards out of the murk only briefly like a sharks fin eclipsing lapping waves. Only half-way through and I really feel immersed in a fully realised sonic world - as though there is a clear, almost cinematic intent behind everything happening. As with the first track, the close is an almost abrupt fade - both short tracks feel like vignettes, two seething slices of sonic life - one in one part of the sonic world and one in another, carefully painting an enigmatic yet colourful picture.
The eponymous third, 'Communion Is A Sacred Word', is the longest track in the album coming just over the seven minute mark - and as well as a more wholesome brood of synth swells we have an almost immediate cloud of delicious fireworks recordings that clatter and clamour above the soup of sound. While it is suggestive to the listener that the artists have made use of field recording here (especially to those who read the album description online), the fireworks sounds are so surreal it would not be unusual to believe they had been sampled and very carefully orchestrated - as there is something so unnatural about the way they harmoniously dance around the ears, slipping and sliding around the synth as though they were composed by the same hand. They glide alongside the ambience of the track forming the 'froth' of the bubbling cauldron of sound - organs, horns and a sound which sounds like a bustling street market seem to lunge forwards from the smoking brim as well. While the synthetic sounds merge and mesh and dance around one another, at no point does the chaotic mixture become too full of disorder, instead the soup of sound blends into one luscious drone - noodling notes wind onwards and onwards and get lost in their own tangles and yet always find their way back to some base point. The listener could easily get lost throughout this track trying to focus on all of the small elements at once. The halt of this tracks end is somehow less abrupt without the fade of the previous two, it closes on a naturally climactic note and a soft echo provides a perfect breath of closure - the first side really pulls you in and leaves you eager to explore the second instalment to this journey.
Opening the second side, 'Mourning In Effigy', provides some sharp synthetic tones that feel like a knife breaking off the edge of a mirror, a sliding wave of bass-heavy tones and a vocal sample that in turns speaks and shouts at the listener - altogether, a really different atmosphere immediately smacks the face of the listener. Where the first side had been dream-like and idyllic this introduction seems a bit more grounded in reality, harshness and "noise forms" as the artists themselves put it on the label site. With this said, towards the second half of the track some more palatable synth notes come through to continue providing a bed of sound for the vocal tirade to continue over.
On to the second, 'Soylent Paws, Withered Skin', and we have a very subtle play of ambient hissing noise, slowed trawling sounds buried in murky reverb and a lightly flute-like synth melody that twitters over the top. Here more than anywhere else, although it does permeate the whole album, I feel a kinship to the ambient music of Boards of Canada and to some extent Aphex Twin as well - although the use of field recording and samples tends to lean much closer to the former. I consider both projects to be staples of the IDM genre and important figures in their own right for ambient music in general - so whether there was any actual personal influence from the projects on Red Cliffs or not, for me there is an added nostalgic feeling listening to tracks that seem to share qualities with them. Of this entire side, this is the only track which never seems abrasive, it settles nicely back into the dream-like stupor of the first side, reminding us of it briefly before we move on.
The closer, 'Obsolete Beauty (For SK)', opens with some luscious scraping sounds - like metal scraping metal, or perhaps glass, clanging and stabbing punctuate a soft high-pitched whine. And slowly but surely this is met with a slow soup of whirring synth, punctuated by its own occasional vocal sample that floats around much less grounded than the guttural implement-noise that continues to sputter. All four elements coalesce perfectly, and about halfway-in the high-pitched whine becomes a searing wail - the albums "gaseous ambiences" have bowed out of their album-long dominance here to give way to the "crumbled noise forms" - and so we know the sonic journey must be coming to a close. Noise hiss cuts in and out intermittently as the wail closes, only for the wail to take itself back up as a dazed cloud of synthetic strings builds itself into a coiling tower. It is intriguing to watch the different layers of this track unfold and interact in surprising ways - it's here that the merging of ambience and noise really astounds and so it works very well as a closing composition.
All over, this album really stunned me. I had perhaps been expecting something slightly noisier but I was hardly disappointed for it being more weighted by ambient music, as the ways in which it wed the two were always flawless. I couldn't recommend this album enough! It's quite an old one in the Gerauschmanufaktur catalogue now, as the label has recently enjoyed a surge of activity with a whole new batch of tapes, nevertheless as of writing there are still five copies left - so it's nearing the end of its run - I would move fast and grab a copy if you haven't, and also check out the new releases on the label, many of which are awe-inspiring.