Sawt Out — Black Current

Sawt Out's Black Current is an LP of surreal soundscape and collage, which immediately recalled the darkly dreamlike energy of Nurse WIth Wound.  It is their 3rd album since debuting in 2018.

It's a largely quiet album which presents the listener with a subtle panorama of rustling, breathing, rattling and gusts of air, a plethora of sounds that could be created incidentally, either by living organisms or by industrial machinery.  The experience of hearing it is not unlike awakening in a disoriented state, surrounded by sounds without knowing their origin.  The first piece, in particular, seems to draw from albums like "Homotopy to Marie".

At times I hear what sounds like a train stopping, and a sort of metallic wailing that could be a misused violin or a protesting piece of bent metal.  The metallic tones paired with a sort of monastic pacing and meditative energy remind me of the work of Organum (David Jackman), who brought an unlikely spirituality to the sounds of the industrial human environment.

The second side begins with the introduction of some percussion: cymbals, woodblocks, and a big booming bass drum, played thoughtfully with a ritual affect.  With a density of anxious cymbal taps, and not nearly as many disembodied or unidentifiable sounds as on side A, and , the track starts feeling closer to a free jazz improvisation.

Recommended particularly for fans of post-industrial ambient collage artists like Nurse With Wound, Irr. App (ext), Illusion of Safety or Andrew Liles.  It falls short of the absolute strangeness of the aforementioned groups, but it's a pleasantly immersive slice of glimmering, cavernous, ambiguous magical ambient that brings fragments of the dream state into the waking world.  Anyone open to textural sound experiments could potentially find it enjoyable, provided they are willing to accept a lack of rhythmic or melodic structure, and an emphasis on the richness of individual sounds resonating against a backdrop of darkness. To find out more