Siôn Orgon — Discord In Disorder

Siôn Orgon is a Cardiff-based sound designer, experimental composer and multimedia artist with a career spanning over two decades. He is a long-time collaborator of Thighpaulsandra (Coil and Julian Cope) and a full-time member of the band, Rocketgoldstar. He has also collaborated with Damo Suzuki (Can), The Waterboys, Peter Christopherson and a host of other artists along the way.

Discord and Disorder is his latest offering, using electronics, found sounds and acoustics to create 14 tracks that plot the narrative relationship between discord and disorder through avant-garde aural explorations. Before we even think about the music, we must first talk about the album cover; not since the early days of Carcass have I seen something quite like, it takes me all the way back to Reek of Putrefaction and Symphonies of Sickness. A collage made up from images of angry infected skin, bodily mutilations and seriously diseased teeth is definitely a way to get the listener to take note. This tells the listener a great deal; this album has completely dropped any semblance of the avant-pop music that featured in previous work to create something even more experimental and even more out there.

The album opens with “The Collapsed Lungs of Silence”, a short piece featuring a host of glitchy spoken-word, radio, and found-sound samples strung together. “Schism” follows with a series of electronic drones, weird synth sounds, and even more ambient found-sound material to keep the listener glued to their stereo. “Chaos in Bloom” is up next and follows in a similar vein to Schism, but you can’t help feeling that this one has a far creepier, more oppressive atmosphere. It’s less glitchy and feels less chaotic (bizarrely so considering the title), but it makes the skin crawl. “Duality Decent” returns to the more glitchy, synthy electronica of “Schism”, while “Inside the Fracture Dome” sounds like an outtake from an experimental sci-fi movie soundtrack. “Malfunction Ataxia” starts off in similar territory before eventually shifting into something far noisier and dissonant.

“Sonic Rebellions” heads in more of a dark ambient direction, closer in style to “Chaos in Bloom”, but with a less sinister feel to it. Riot of the Spheres starts slowly with some fairly muted found sounds and aural samples before building steadily into an ominous wall of noise before suddenly dropping off again. “The Body of Asunder” features some of the freakiest-sounding glitchy distorted sounds that I’ve ever heard, and I absolutely love it for it. I’m not sure if they are distorted synth sounds or found sounds that have been messed with to create something otherworldly, but damn do they work. “Tidal Violence” takes us back into the darker side of electronica with something that feels like it would work well on the soundtrack to Tetsuo, The Iron Man. Blending gentle atmospheric moments with full-on white noise to create something that ebbs and flows like the tide of the title. The title track “Discord in Disorder” features more unintelligible audio samples and some sinister dark ambient sounds, whereas “Cacophony of Voice” features loads of weird bleeps and bloops that take me back to the BBC Radiophonic Workshop at their weirdest. “Pineal Glitch” is the album’s penultimate track, taking us back down the dark ambient rabbit hole. Built around synth drones, it’s a darkly beautiful piece of music that elicits a range of different feelings from uplifting and gentle to sinister and ominous. The album closes with “Flesh Modem”, which sounds like the aural equivalent of David Cronenberg’s Existenz, a glitchy mutation of sounds that feels both organic and manufactured at the same time.

Overall, Discord in Disorder is an excellent album of weird glitchy sounds and drones, peppered throughout with real instrumentation such as piano, saxophone, trumpet and violin. That mixture of instrumentation gives the whole thing a weird vibe that highlights the amalgamation of the abstract electronic sounds and the more traditional acoustic instrumentation. The album does not rely on traditional song structures to create its overall sound; however, what it does do is meld elements that come from a more traditional style of music and shoves them through a blender to create something that feels both organic and electronic at the same time. Only 300 copies of the CD were released of this album, and if you can grab one, I would recommend it. If you can’t get hold of a copy, I would advise you to head over to their Bandcamp and buy the mp3s as this is a cracking listen.