Vomir — Energia Exhausta
From March this year, Energia Exhausta is a new full-length album from the long-reigning king of euro-wall noise Vomir - aka French man Romain Perrot. The CD release takes in a single sixty-minute wall, which is focused on rapid battering & cluttering ‘walling’. I’d say it feels a little looser/ roughshod than the project's other work- though maybe this is down to it being sourced from a nearly broken amp
The release appears on Perrot’s own Decimation Sociale label- the CD comes presented in a stark/ lo-fi looking black typewriter-text on plain white digipak. It features minimal text and a few blocks of overlayered character blocks. The release comes in an edition of just 200 copies, though there is a thirty-minute digital edit of the track available.
The track opens in a fairly surprising manner- as you normally expect to jump straight in thick & dense, but instead we get around two minutes of uneven thin layer ripples, crude cracks, and distant static hiss.
When we kick into the ‘wall’, it’s a rather roughshod, rapid, and decidedly crude take on the wall-noise form. It has a full/ if not in any way separated, sound- where we find a mix of battering mids, galloping clutters, and buffeting ‘n’ baying static rushing sub-tones, with possibly a fixed tunnelling drone at the base of the whole thing. At points it feels like there may be a few layers that are internally breaking down- but I’m not sure if this is just one's imagination.
It’s certainly not a ‘wall’ you can easily hear/ separate the textures on display & their paths/ shapes. And if this is something you attempt to do when listening to wall-noise, I’d advise you to try and not- as I tried this the first few plays through, and found it somewhat of frustration listen. You're far better off letting it just surround & engulf you- letting the almost shapeless sonic nihilism well and truly envelop you.
Even after twenty-plus years and literally hundreds of releases, Vomir still remains firm & focused in its want to create an unchanging & totally nihilistic sound rush. And I’d say that Energia Exhausta is one of the purer examples of this- as there are no defined patterns/ shapes to lock into; instead, we find an hour's worth of looking into the void noise-making.