Nasty little fillips flick repetitively out of the speakers
like the sound of something passing too quickly for
comfort. Something starts to happen a little way away,
it seems to be some form of frequency adjustment. This
might be a testing ground. Those fillips are still shooting
past. These noises are very tactile, seems possible
to reach out and touch them, though who knows what effect
that would have. Those frequencies are getting louder,
their sonorities ever more threatening. The fillips
cease. The noises are no longer individuated; there
is only noise now. Noise remains. Noise has taken over,
won through, succeeded. All such descriptions are ridiculously
anthropomorphic. One’s response to noise may be
cerebral, as well as physical, but noise itself is like
being scolded by a too-hot bath. If the pain can be
endured, the experience can be a release, a middle finger
up to the acceptable. Noise is a joyful extreme, it’s
like staring at the surface of a rock: there’s
no repetition – the more you look, the more everything
becomes irresolvable. As you submit to noise, you realise
that everything is happening too quickly and in too
microcosmic a way – so much so that it’s
impossible to keep up. As a result you’re faced
with a choice: retreat or surrender. Noise really does
win out. There’s no arguing with noise. It’s
easy to understand how noise could become a thrillingly
addictive narcotic.
Lasse Marhaug’s noise undergoes a number of successive
phases. Each phase is noticeable at the moment of change,
thereafter it’s as though it was always that way.
Noise is huge steel objects dragged unwillingly over
concrete. Noise is volcanoes erupting. Noise is cleansing
fire. Noise is unbearable pain. In the last minute of
the twenty-minute long Sleeper, a rhythm unexpectedly
emerges as though made from bending the sounds that
went before it into a particular shape. Then it’s
over.
Magmadriver is a different brand of noise,
a different species. It’s a plague of hornets
so vast that day becomes night. Every single one of
those hornets is frenziedly furious and you’re
the cause of their ire. You’re their target. It
takes them 13 minutes to reach you. It Is My Kind
Of Top layers different types of noise on top of
each other like geological strata reduced through volcanic
eruption to magma and steam. In its – and the
album’s – last minute a singing becomes
audible as though the very earth were crying out in
pain and pleasure.
Noise is a word that is just not onomatopoeic enough
– the hard-edged ‘n’ with which it
begins isn’t blunt enough, the hiss of its ‘s’
only a narrow hint at the sounds it so inadequately
represents. Noise is cathartic, obliterating, coruscating.
It’s unwelcome unless it’s welcome. Listen
too long and noise becomes everything and anything that
isn’t noise is a compromise. Ultimately noise
is noise is noise is noise is noise is noise is noise
is noise is noise is noise is noise is noise is noise
is noise is noise is noise is noise is noise is noise
is noise is noise is noise is noise is noise is noise
is noise is noise is noise is noise is noise is noise
is noise is noise is noise is noise is noise is noise
is noise is noise is noise is noise is noise is noise
is noise is noise is noise is noise is noise is noise
is noise is... (which is of course a vast oversimplification).
The Shape Of Rock To Come is fascinating, detailed,
extreme. Its five tracks each explore varying degrees
of intensity. Each one would be singularly useful for
cauterising wounds.
Colin Buttimer
4/5 |
