The Seagulls Want Your Eyes — Ephemeral

The Seagulls Want Your Eyes is yet another project from the highly prolific & respected French noise maker Julien Skrobek- who for around the last ten years or so has been releasing work that darts in & out of the walled noise/ textured noise genre. From the evidence of this C30 tape the projects sound is best described as washed & hazed out wall-making, that has a very barren & ill-defined quality to it.

This tape was self released by Julien last year- with the plain black cassette tape coming in folded monochrome cover featuring overhead shots of a bomb out city. Not sure how many copies these where ltd to, or if they are any left- but I’m guessing if you know Mr Skrobek work you’ll have good ideas of where to find-out.

The first side track is entitled “Falling”- and here we find a extremely washed-out/ thinly mixed blend of rapid rushing & baying textures, these are underfeed by a thick matt of blunt drone haze. It sounds like you listening to the 'wall' been played on a battered  & bashed stereo from the other side of a room- so the whole thing feels very necro, flat & ill-defined. I can certainly hear that Skrobek is trying to create a  highly  worn & weathered feel to the track, and while it does succeed I felt there was too little texturally going on here to fully pull one in, and by the tenth minute of this fourteen minute track it had out stayed it’s welcome.

Flipping over to side B, and we have the track “Fallen”- once again this is extremely hazed/ muffled in it’s recording, and this time we find a blend of droned-out rumble & choppy static. I found this track much more appealing & rewarding- as the way the two elements are blended together it often feels like either one  of the tones is slowing or speeding up, with the whole thing having an almost feasting organic feel to it- as if one listening to the audio recordings of rapid shifting & churning organic matter under a microscope.

As a sound artists & noise creator Skrobek is always pushing & streaching the edges of the walled-noise/ textured noise genre- looking for new places to take the forms. And with this tape he’s done this once again- as with any form of experimental sound it doesn’t necessarily hit perfectly…so I whiel I respected what he was trying to do on side one, it didn't click with me….but the second side was great, and I could have easily listened to this for an hour plus, getting lost in the rewarding feasting of the tracks two textures.