Unser Verhängnis — Peace Is A Lasting Legacy When The Earth Is A Sile
The project comes from none other than Peter Keller, who has produced amazing work within both the staunchly HNW realm and the seedier sub-realm of ANW and static minimalism. Peter's work continually finds ways to relate to its thematics and motivation in a brutally honesty fashion and this often makes his release nothing short of inspiring. He has been responsible for such projects as the disease-themed Bacillus (his original and longest running, starting out in 1993), Condo Horro - whose 'architectural walls' have more to do with the socio-political issues surrounding housing than they do architecture itself - and Geißt (sometimes written as Geisst) which has been described as "spectral audiographs of ghosts in the machines" and often relies heavily on the mode of HNW production whereby the artist attempts to have as little involvement as possible, rather preferring the process itself 'become alive' and take the noise into uncharted territory the artist would otherwise never have ventured towards. These are just three of Peter's projects that have been making varying shockwaves across the HNW community and the noise world at large but Peter has produced such a plethora of work that it would be hard to go into everything worth mentioning without a dedicated feature-length article or interview.
Needless to say, this is not the first time I've listened to the project, the artist or the label. Going into this release, then, I would agree that I had some considerable bias and built up expectation. I had a good feeling I would find the walls contained within as appropriately haunting, industrial and post-apocalyptic sounding as the outward artwork suggests to the listener. The release comes in a beautiful metallic box, with two c60 cassettes inside, each with a wall to each side. Inside the box we also have a folded up insert with information about the release across bleak imagery that paints a similar world to that of the outside artwork.
On the first cassettes A side we have "Verschlechterung Der Alles" - a monolithic dust cloud of sound swarms the listener. I feel like I'm wearing a hazmat suit with a sophisticated gas mask apparatus and what I can hear is a mixture of penetrating sounds from a devastated environment and the internal sounds of my own devices. It cannot be overstated how the atmosphere of this wall 'oozes' and 'seeps' in such a cloud-like way, you are made to feel very much like you are trapped and enshrouded by a polluted smog. There could not be a more perfect opening dredge for envisioning a human-free planet, utterly devastated by humanity, but in some way of thinking "at peace at last".
On the B side, we have "Taking The Ignominious Place" - a decidely quieter wall, the cloud-like and even "pool-like" qualities remain however, a thick soup of sound gradually envelops the listener. As though some primordial soup of the earth is seeping out of the debris to reclaim the world and attempt to turn the tide on humanity's devastation. Amorphous shifting and bubbling takes the fore and makes this wall much more relaxing than its foreboding predecessor. The 'gloopiness' of the movement has that deliciously submerged quality that many great works of ANW tend to gravitate towards, with varying success. Here, it rears its head in defiant triumph - and where it might have cornered the sound in to this liquid imagery, there is a considerable "airiness" as the listener hears creaking and wind-like blasts that link this wall back to the last and fashion for the two a decipherable "world of sound" that we can place ourselves within.
Opening the second cassette, "Hurtling Toward Oblivion" suggests a lot with its title - and its opening reverberations are full with an echoing impact that hits the listener and displaces them from the aforementione 'world'. This wall seems to evoke that we are now present in some form of vacuum - lending to the imagination the possibility that the title alludes to some form of space death or to some meteoric body on its way to plummet to the surface of our planet and wipe the slate clean. The echoing is paired up nicely with a smoldering crackle and churning, whirling hum that continually escapes sounding too naturalistic and wind-like to maintain this imagery. It almost feels as though there is a pattern emerging, where the first cassette built up a very foreboding and menacing atmosphere only to knock it down into something deeply relaxing - this wall has an appropriately cold and foreboding touch to it as well, perhaps not on quite the same level as the albums first track but all the same, it suggests to the listener that we might experience a similar sequence of sounds and thoroughly submerge into much more ambient and much more minimal sounds in the proceeding and final track.
The albums closing wall, "Ruina Est Hominis", in some ways lives up to this aforementioned 'pattern' - it could certainly be considered more ambient than the last. However, its airy, oven-like hiss and its surprisingly tonal whirring background hum seem to place it more as a very natural progression onward from the same sonic time and place as the A side, rather than turning the atmosphere on its head completely, we hear an evolution - it's the same place but a different time. There are levels and layers of different shifting clicks, creaks and blips of sound that build this wall into an especially encompassing listen. There is something perfectly final and desolate about it, for me it is this track moreso than any of the others that accomplishes what I'm inclined to believe are the intentions of the artist in this release.
Altogether, this release is transportative and deeply rewarding - of all the releases I've heard from the artist this one was particularly good at putting me 'somewhere else' and I cannot recommend it highly enough to those who are interested in applications of the minimal and the ambient that reap a surprising amount of atmosphere and mental imagery for the listener. As of writing this, it appears the label still has copies although it's slightly confusing - the label says this is an edition of fifteen and there are twelve public supporters on the Bandcamp site, this would suggest there are only three copies left available although the site doesn't make mention of this in red writing as I am used to, so it's unclear. Don't sleep on this release, either way!