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ALISTAIR CROSBIE: Sad Faces Of The Moon / Forest Of Swollen Eyes (Peasant Magik / Sick Head)

Posted on Apr 14th 2008 12:17 am

Filed in Albums | Tags: Alistair Crosbie, Peasant Magik, Sick Head
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ALISTAIR CROSBIE
Sad Faces Of The Moon / Forest Of Swollen Eyes
PM26 / Sick Head 13
Peasant Magik 2008 / Sick Head 2008
02 Tracks. 29mins01secs / 05 Tracks. 40mins12secs

The bedroom on the face of it is not the most likely place to find yourself staring into the void. Sleep, sex and TV, perhaps, but little else is usually on offer. Yet from the confines of his four-walled bedroom studio Alistair Crosbie has produced two records here that look oblivion straight in the face, and refuse to flinch. His source material, towers of distortion and feedback, is used to construct artificial universes of emptiness, where meaning and direction are overwhelmed by walls of noise. The results might at times seem frightening, but these are both truly startling releases.

Unlike last year’s relatively tranquil The Lonesome Age Of Mirrors, both of these records have the feel of desolation explored, although that is not to say that what we get is bleak or despairing. Sad Faces Of The Moon, for instance, is like a world in itself – neither good nor bad, but dark, dense and crammed with glowering intensity. In a way, it could easily stand as an alternative soundtrack to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, with Crosbie’s music regularly evoking monoliths of one sort or another. He would deny it, of course, but it might even be a counterpoint to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon. Yet whereas Floyd’s opus on lunacy was stained with flower-pressed melodiousness, Crosbie is more interested in the flip-side of melody, and with harrowing, echoing vacancies. His mordant sense of humour, witnessed recently in an interview with this website, is subsumed here beneath the crumbling sound sculptures he builds and destroys. But his obvious seriousness is an asset rather than a drain on collections as strikingly adventurous as these.

These releases are if anything companion piece studies in emptiness, although they vary with their subtle changes of approach. Forest Of Swollen Eyes is more percussive and more recognisably human, with flickers of guitar occasionally combining to offer distant reference points. The Wrong Shade Of Blue, for instance, would probably fit well on a post-rock primer syllabus, with its scattered guitar strums emerging from columns of distorted feedback. I Whispered My Name So Quietly And Yet Somehow You Still Heard Me is another in this vein, book-ending the release with a drawn-out coda of wailing guitars. Sad Faces is more about brooding, rumbling studio noise, often difficult to unpick amid the waves of feedback-soaked intensity. Where Forest is at least distantly human, Sad Faces sounds more like the whirring heartbeat of a dying machine. Menacing, overwhelming, yet often enigmatically lyrical, it remains somehow deeply personal despite its untraceable origins.

Crosbie is producing music at a rate that is difficult to keep up with these days. But with these two releases we are seeing the makings of a true auteur of sound, in the proper sense of that word. Where Kubrick in the cinema saw humans as distant pin-pricks on his cosmic map, though, Crosbie seems to be looking far beyond them and above – to the howling face of the infinite itself. That might sound almost ludicrously po-faced, but listen to these records and it soon becomes clear – this is a man who needs to be recognised.

Sad Faces Of The Moon 4.2/5
Forest Of Swollen Eyes 4.1/5

Icon: arrow Alistair Crosbie (MySpace) | Peasant Magik | Sick Head Tapes