 |
||||
|
|
|||
|
Alan Lockett
e/i |
|
||
|
||||
|
Matthew Florianz's eleventh release sees him in somber world-weary mood, that’s if we go by his identification of “what has been going on in the Netherlands and the larger world surrounding it” as being behind the initial ideas inspiring Niemandsland. And well might he entitle this collection “No Man's Land,” for these articulations of wild and windswept wastes inhabit a space actively prohibitive of feelings of home or belonging, like the Hic Sunt Leones of the old cartographers.
The signature sound of this region is one of billowing smear-drones ranging across the soundstage, enshrouding the listener in a foggy blur, driving inward to isolationist-inclined questing or outward to frown-on-the-void dystopia. The accompanying visuals reinforce atmospherics and issue pointers to a specific affective place—monochromatic, austere neo-expressionist rather than minimalist, at times almost like a forlorn ceremonial. An air of something like desolation imbues the proceedings, at times seemingly portending some barely-envisioned eclipse of humanity, at others, with its elemental sounds of wind and naturalia providing an extra timbral element to pitched material, seemingly expressive of environmental ferment. “Herfst” hoists up a shifting and shimmering curtain of sound with sustains whose textures are strangely both delicate and gritty, simultaneously pristine and grubby. Continuing thematic flow is “Spiegel” with its ominous low drone that slowly streams into upper-end radiance, edges roughened and tainted with echo-feedback. The materiality of Florianz’s work on Niemandsland is one of meshed layers, some dissonant but staying on the side of the grainy and glurpy, others more conventionally musical, but with consonant harmonic material distinctly more reticent than on best-known work, Grijsgebied. The extensive field recordings here, such as deployed on the cavernous void-outfolding of “Verdwaald” and “Niemandsland” itself, signal a departure from the mainly synthetic drone-based work of recent years. The latter, an 18-minute brooder, too epic to be merely ambient, subtly mutates and evolves into a massive cloud of tuned air mixed with chord-rush to occupy a space not far removed from Roach’s Magnificent Void. Having quietened to a virtual lull, it regroups its forces, sonorously rising in a fabulous upsurge to close in what feels like a lightening of the skies after a laregly tenebrous voyage. It shows how versatile an orchestrator of flow and drift Florianz is, capable of hymning the heavens, should he choose, but on Niemandsland it’s predominantly a willful, almost portentous, bleakness and an earthly disquiet that seems the obscure object of his muse’s desire. |
|
|
||
|
||||
