The Ebony Tower/Big Hole — The Room

This large, six CD set comes in a DVD case, adorned with suitably bleak, black and white imagery of a woman seemingly trapped in a room. We know that she is indeed trapped in a room, because the release’s title is the same as a book by its dedicatee: Hubert Selby Jr.

I don’t intend to ruin it for you, but The Room is a gruelling novel about a mind ruminating, obsessing, straining, and eating itself - a harrowing read, and perfect material for HNW. Each act delivers three long tracks each, one to a disc, with the shortest coming in at 51:28 minutes. The first three discs are taken by The Ebony Tower, and are simply titled Part One, Part Two, and Part Three - as are Big Hole’s contributions. I don’t think there’s any correlation between these and the structure of the book, however; I do have a copy of The Room on my shelf, but it’s been a good while since I read it.

To jump straight into conclusions, as it were, it’s almost as if both projects have divided the task of interpreting or reflecting The Room between them. To broadly generalise, it’s as if The Ebony Tower has taken on the role of depicting the book in terms of content and structure, whilst Big Hole has concentrated on more overarching atmospheres and tones. The Ebony Tower discs all contain shifts and developments, with multiple textures being coaxed out of the walls. These are often equalisation tweaks, since the paces of the individual tracks vary little from beginning to end. Part One ranges from strong, fizzing textures, to more hollowed out walls, from sections with pronounced treble frequencies (and a strange wind-like effect), to sections where the textures are thinned to just those treble elements. Following Part One’s slow, slow fade out, Part Two is dominated first by a nasty, shrill attack of static, and then secondly by a strong, low end churn; it ends, after some scuffing, with a near-wash of a wall. The third track/disc, Part Three, is based on a speeding, bassy wall, which kicks up flecks of dirt as it passes. In the course of the piece, these textures are tweaked to produce passages of near white-out, as well as a nice section of savage, scratchy treble.

In contrast to these developments, the Big Hole efforts are much more overwhelmingly static in tone. Part One is a very nicely crafted, slow-burning wall: flickering and hollowed, with dancing grit and gravel. It’s considerably less intense than the tracks from The Ebony Tower, but what it loses in this way, it gains from detached, creeping dread. Part Two is perhaps somewhat conventional in the context of the whole set, being built around a galloping, mid-frequency strong, wall. However, there appear to be sounds - akin to voices or sirens - buried in some sections, as well as some shifts in the textures. The final work of the release, Part Three, is very special - a hovering, bassy wall, with billowing treble crunch. The low end of the track is almost a filtered ambient drone, which gives the piece an unusual, striking character. As the track progresses, a thin line of treble crackle emerges incredibly slowly; this detail - which has a synth-y/feedback-like tone - gradually overwhelms Part Three until the work becomes a grating, caustic skree.

Released as two separate albums, both The Ebony Tower and Big Hole would have created excellent works with their respective tracks; however, combined as one, they present an embarrassment of riches. The Room is a very consummate piece of wall-making. The tracks from The Ebony Tower, with their shifts and distinct passages, perhaps reflect on the changes in narration, voice, and tone used by Selby in his book. While the pieces from Big Hole arguably take a more detached view of the bleak, claustrophobic existence of its damaged protagonist. A very recommended release.