[reviews] afe076lcd
non ethos: syk asfalt

"Syk Asfalt" takes the listener into a strange wet and grey world, where slowly decaying buildings appear out of rancid fog, black spores trails and growths creep over ever surface and the stagnant air is always heavy with dark threat.

And it just carries on raining and raining within this world, imagine if Béla Tarr decided to do a grim horror film this is the audio equivalent of it.

The album is built around all manner of wet, sodden, crunching, decaying and crumbling sounds, along with underground groaning of rushing water. Trails of grim ambience appearing ever so often to leak out bleak harmonics, but the main focus here is on sound texture and not ambience.

The tapestry of sound that are taken in are: grey torrents of grim rain, crunching and crumbing brick work, bellowing dead winds, sluggish sewage and death clog water ways. This feels likes the soundtrack to an eternal dieing planet, which decays all that go with in its atmosphere from the inside out.

Tracks like "Erosion" actually give the feeling that the inside of your head is been slowly eaten and decayed away - the roof of your mouth melting and collapsing into your throat, as your teeth splash out in the grey puddles that surround you.

A grim, decaying and diseased exercise in audio discomfort which at times you can almost taste and smell its rotten core and its slow endless crawl to putrefaction.

[Roger Batty]