Vomir — Les Escaliers De La Cave
The pro-pressed CD comes in a black & white card slip-sleeve, and this takes in a densely packed, detailed & tripped-out line drawing of a surreal imaginary world that’s full with naked females, gravity defying architecture, and tripped-out shapes. It looks more like the kind of thing you’d expect to appear on the cover of a 1960’s or 1970’s psychedelic bands release- but I guess it’s interesting choice as Vomir's sound can often seem to have a shifting & moving textural quailty to it, when in reality his HNW is one of the most fixed, dense & unmoving.
The release takes in two “Untitled” tracks- track one comes in just over the five minute mark, and track two comes in just over the hour mark. So the first track is built around a thick mesh of seemingly continual descending low-end churning, which is tightly wrapped to a thick mid-range crackle. The track feels like your falling though a endless grey static ribbed & snow heavy atmosphere, and you just seem to carry on falling & falling. It’s difficult to really quantify the actual speed of the ‘wall’, as the way Vomir has constructed it, it sometimes feels like it’s rapid, yet at others slowing- but of course in reality it’s very much fixed.
The second track is sequenced directly in from the first for a nice effective jault. It's built around a repetitive mid- ranged jittering ‘n’ juddering textural pattern, which has a thinner layer of constantly crackling ‘n’ weathered static underneath it. Where the first track felt like you were descending, this second track feels like your locked in some sort of looped & circular white-out, as the ‘wall’ just churns you round & round. If you really focus in on the textural patterns the ‘wall’ almost gives you an unbalancing feel, but I have to say for me it just felt a little too long for it’s own good- sure you have this unbalancing vibe which is neat, but ultimately I felt the ‘wall’ didn’t really suck me in, or entrance me much beyond the 20 or so minute work. So at an hour I found the whole becoming very tiresome.
So I can’t say that “Les Escaliers De La Cave” is one of my favourite Vomir releases, yes I enjoyed the first ‘wall’, and I enjoyed the idea of the second one, but not it’s lengthy run….it’s a pity he couldn’t have reverse the track lengths round- so the first came in at an hour, and second at just five minutes.