Redglaer — Petals & Scars
Redglaer is the project of Bob Bellerue, a name I’ve heard being thrown around for a bit but whose works I’d not yet had the pleasure to hear prior to spinning Petals & Scars. Bellerue has recorded and released under his own name as well as several aliases, including Halfnormal, and who is also in groups such as Kilt and Dead Wolf Black. On top of all this, Bellerue runs the Anarchymoon label, which has released works by such excellent artists as Blue Sabbath Black Cheer, Justice Yeldham, Damien Romero and John Wiese. If your interest is not piqued by now, hey, I don’t know what possibly could.
As attested, this is the first thing I’ve ever heard by Bob Bellerue and/or any of his projects, and as far as love at first hearing can definitely strike when I pop in a, to me, new artist’s tape or disc, it very much did not with Petals & Scars. Quite unfortunately, the only explicit emotion the tape evoked with me was pure and utter boredom.
Petals & Scars, for the largest part, consists of unattractive deep bass rumbling, which plows forth at an almost sub-audible level, and while it is admirably deep and low, there’s nothing else to it to make it even remotely interesting. The unstoppable burps of bassy thunder are of no interest melodically, harmonically or dissonantly, showing no signs of progression or craftsmanship. If you play the tape at an adequately loud volume, you might cause a minor earthquake, but, I’m afraid, that’s probably as far as excitement goes with it.
The bass fundamentals are liberally added to with distant scrapes and clangs, which are piled atop out of a motivation seemingly stemming from neither a sense of aesthetics nor musical ideology. Instead, the sounds seem rather superficially inspired by what, literally, heaps of artists have been doing in the past fifteen to twenty years, as though the artist is simply mimicking their established aesthetics without actually taking them and making them his own. And so, Petals & Scars drags itself forth for the entirety of a C60, with very, very little to make it adventurous or even listenable. The brief excursions into different sound palettes do certainly not manage to make me more benevolent.
The tape itself, it must be said, looks excellent, courtesy of the label, Third Sex; thermal on-body printing and full-colour artwork – literally, no expenses were spared. However, unfortunately though befittingly, it has a similarly tired sense of aesthetics. A slightly blurry picture of a flower graces the cover, something we’ve seen before, lots of times, and which was pretty and acceptable way back when, but which you can now only get away with if you’re a WWF campaign or a National Geographic commercial.
On the whole, I can find little to enjoy on Petals & Scars. Even as an exercise in minimalism it does not manage to intrigue. Most severely, the tape lacks a clear sense of direction and inspiration; there is no purpose or ideal that drives the tape forward, making it feel tired and obligatory. Doubtlessly, Petals & Scars is not entirely representative of the rest of Bellerue’s output, and, if anything, this tape makes me only more curious of what he’s done on other releases. This one, however, is just not very good.