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LABEL PROFILE CYCLIC LAW Cyclic Law is a label established to promote musicians who express themselves through "dark ambient" and "industrial/martial" sub-genres. Owner Frederic Arbour's mission is to release "obscure" quality music with an eye to an aesthetic articulated through artwork/packaging. Given its flaunting of dark ambient and industrial lineage on an ominous black website with a Teutonic rune logo, overtones of Cold Meat Industry and the like are inevitable. The uninitiated listener approaching CL's releases is thus already primed for the making of dire readings-The Rite Stuff, a subculture of sacral signs, of baroque bruitism and black backwash, with repulsion and rage attendant. And, while there is much here confirming stereotype, with imagination and flexibility, some CL acts are shaken loose from being enmired in all the associated fetishization of dark portent. Cosmic angst is all very well, but the undertones of misanthropic moralism and thanatophilia are less welcome to those seeking musical rather than unholy communion. Approaching their releases as genuine dark ambient (emphasis on ambient) though, some of these musical tracts are deployable like a canvas onto which the listener creates their own self-projected images. Only up to a point, though, for the "industrial" and "bombastic neo-classical" (from CL promotional literature) are waiting in the wings. This then is a voyage, not into the dark unknown, but something of a dark known, the extent and configuration of whose dark, however, is to be explored. First up is a work less amenable to such openness of reading. Arcana is not especially representative of CL house style, being linked to an artist who has more affinity with CMI, whose early years, if not wrote, then certainly institutionalized much of the whole late-period dark industrial mythology. The New Light is in fact Arcana's first release outside CMI, an album commemorating ten years of endeavor, leader Peter Bjärgö selecting unreleased tracks and alternative versions of material from a period spanning 94-03. For the unaware, Arcana peddle a mix of neo-classical, mournful medieval and solemn synthematics that would make a virtue out of usually critical terms like "grandiloquent" and "portentous," with melodramatic strings and Bjärgö's over-ripe Brendan Perry-like voice to top off the rococo confection. For the non-adept, this is a somewhat over-rich concoction, its appeal seeming very much to a certain type of morose goth-romantic expressionism ala Dead Can Dance and Black Tape for a Blue Girl, complete with worn-out sounding synth presets, and faux-Arabism. The strengths of Arcana would appear to be what makes it distinct, though not necessarily likeable, i.e., Bjärgö's undeniably felt vocals and the sound of real instruments, a later developed tendency. The New Light is probably best regarded as a prequel for established Arcana-philes. Lustmord's iconic dark ambient place-marker, The Place Where the Black Stars Hang, would probably be the template aspired to by most of the CL crew, and Kammarheit's Asleep And Well Hidden gets well into this zone. The work of Pär Boström conjurs up atavistic ruins, organic-mechanic collisions (and collusions), and tectonic rumbles. The shadows and cold atmospherics adumbrated by the drones and rumbles have a particularly brooding and distinctly Nordic quality, though possessed of enough individuality and sound design detail to draw you in. Compositions invoke lost and abandoned topographies-a Nordic European version of Forgotten Gods, the visual-sonic linkages signalled by titles and artwork. Deep-grained consonant drones adorn a shadowy collection of deep oneiric melancholy. Kammarheit's later The Starwheel offers much the same atmospheres though with a more enfolding spiritual-seeming depth. "Hypnagoga" starts the collection off with the customary winds and eruptions mixed with ur-drone, but the mood is more of awe than shock, more celestial than infernal. The drone dark is ever-present but more spacious, less claustrophobic, though still imbued with a pronounced mournfulness. "All Quiet in the Land of Frozen Scenes," for example, is quite tranquil, with tidal rumblings that emanate into ripples, evoking the calm after storm, while "A Room Between the Rooms" starts out threateningly but ends in soft buzzing and chiming. Boström deploys his minimal palette of endless sustains and reverberant externalia to paint sorrowful soundscapes that stop short evokings rooms of gloom. Haunting, haunted and hauntological. Swede Gustaf Hildebrand (possibly better known as CMI act Lithivm) seems less earthbound, more astral-seeking, on Starscape, a mysterious sonography beyond the atmospheric. Long toneswathes and rumbling dissonant waves perturbed by discomfiting crackings and creakings, it's vast, and as the listener you are an insignificant speck of dust in suspension. "Dead Transmissions" is a thick tarry ooze crawling with snatches of lost communications. The sound is so well resolved that each resonance of a wave or a bass rumble is emplaced to create the most oppressive and visceral sensation of the hostile elementality of the intergalactic. The zenith is reached on the coldly hypnotic "Cygnus Loop," the soundtrack to a Lovecraftian sci-fi chiller if ever there was. The final "Descending Into the Silent Depths" abandons the low-drone strategy that's obtained for five-sixths of the disc, and opts instead for a spooked spin of an echoing staticky twirl in a hollow metallic chamber. The artwork of the textured trifold sleeve offers as visual linkage a nebula of light, planets, and aurora borealis. The same artist's later Primordial Resonance presents another aural expedition not for the faint-hearted, lying somewhere between Lustmord's The Monstrous Soul and more extreme noise-mongery ala Inade. As "Omega Continuum" oozes thickly out, it's all lost terrain with haunting voices and black fogbound swirls, remote machine klang, foghorn din, and netherworld moans-industrial business-as-usual. Then an unwanted lushness arrests the listener into a twilight lullaphony. "Post Oblivion Fields" hosts low hums and a wind blowing through the tracks, broad and spacious, metal clangs floating on a bed of drones. The house style again. Tonal soundslabs arc thickly enshrouded in atonal textures and undead air blast as if atmosphere were turned inside out on itself, seeking to turn outside in. Any number of metallic scuffings, corroded cymbals, distorted externa, chafing and abrading bespeckle a dense echo-chambered haze. "Omnivoid," with its rumble and heavy tonal motif, suggests Hildebrand as some evil twin of Roach channeling Malevolent Void. "Ruins of a Failed Utopia" bespeaks a bleak, derelict, post-industrial yet ancient wasteland in perpetual near dark. This music brooks no relaxation, but rather demands your soul remain eternally undead. Unsettling and undeniably tenebrous time-stretched trippery, but nonetheless one of CL's more compelling ethnographers of nullity. Be careful out there. Karjalan Sissit's Tanssit On Loppu Nyt sees the tortured Markus Pesonen indulging an appetite for self-destruction. Whether exulting in the intensity of hate-romancing, or seeking a cathartic purging of personal demons, this collection is truly a painful experience to be party to. He proclaims: "This is my personal W.A.R. against everything that reveals my hate! You are the enemy!" If the hymning of hate is to your taste, be his guest. And if you're partial to martial, step right up. Otherwise this is gristly and grizzly gruel indeed. From the opening, thundering timpani rolls of "Tää On Katastroofi, Saatana" with its unholy bombast, full-on quasi-militaristic percussive barrage, a refrain that is little more than guttural yelling, and dissonant background choirs, the evidently misanthropic Pesonen is on your case (remember, "You are the enemy!"). This is where CL's "dark ambient" is erased; it's the gothic militaristic industrial takeover. In fact, this is where undertones of Scandinavian black metal creep out, not in the musical backing so much as the misanthropic self-destructive attitude. "Kiitän Puolestani" is less of a Munch's scream, though it's orchestral soundtrack-like strings and Dalek-like altered vocal recitation (in Finnish) speak only of leagues-deep despair. The string intensity gets the full Wagner on "Nagon Vacker Dag Far du Smaka Pa Finn Yxan Javla Rip-off Gubbe." No Ride of the Valkyries, though, just intense drone gloom topped off with those sullen string sweeps. Artwork illumines its origins: themes of alcoholism, bitterness, and anti-socialism. So it goes. From mournful orchestral to pounding rhythmic industrial, back and forth. And that guttural sub-metal voice ever-lamenting its miserable plight. Karjalan Sissit is perhaps situated in a Scandinavian tradition which interfaces with the demonic, the satanic, albeit in pastiched form. A theatre of hate, with barely a tremor of listening pleasure. And New Risen Throne follows hot on the heels of Sissit, presenting the latest cycle, a stern slab of outright funereal ambient attended by martial industrial overtones. Snappily trailed as "a bleak and sorrow filled soundtrack celebrating death with little hope for rebirth...," you kind of know what you're in for with this one. Never mind no picnic, there's not even a stale sandwich to be seen, as Italian Gabriele Panci effortlessly filches the mantle of blackest of ambient-industrialites from the CMI massive, wreaking the most wretched of all bleak envisionings. The portentous "Signs of the Approaching Wastefulness (I)" coldly dins in, all doom-gloom booming, writhing with altered vox-wraiths in some hellish purgatory. This New Risen Throne is upholstered with lumpy fabric splashed with viscous tonesludge spilt out onto a dire update of a Hieronymus Bosch tableaux. It's done with a baleful grim prowess, as if exulting in the absolute desolation of it all. "Prophet III" is the ultimate in apocalyptic clangor with some deranged demagogue harangue stretched out over cacophonous clanking. There is little subtlety in the heavy-handedly trowelled-on leagues-deep miserabilism of "Aporrheton," with its lachrymose samples, its desolate flute, and descending chromatic dirge-lament, but perhaps it's in the nature of this music to lay it on thick for all the sturm und drangers. The final part, "Signs Of The Approaching Wastefulness (III)," is more restrained but no less insistent in its nihilism, leaving arcane layers of atrophied choral hymnals floating into the abysmal depths it has summoned up. "Signs Of The Approaching Wastefulness" does what it says on the tin. The tin's contents, however, are deeply unpalatable. After NRT's orgy of entropy, Northaunt's Horizons offers the balm of an almost serene atmospheric ambient. All relative, of course. Combining samples, electronic drones, and Nordic field recordings, H¾rleif LangŒs creates desolate isolationist-inclined soundscapes, perhaps existential in that they seem to invoke nature's implacability as opposed to other anthropomorphic notions of "majesty" (not for nothing was an earlier album called Barren Lands). The ensemble of dark cloudscapes, icy winds, and rain-beaten shorelines is Northaunt's signifier and signified, as he mimetically samples what he portrays. Easy to characterize as minimalistic icy ambient with sparse slightly classical accents, the communion of drones, spacious synth, and biospherical field recordings the essential ambit of Horizons. Centerpiece "Night Came to Us," an inky 14-minute effusion, is more occluded and haunted-sounding. Ultimately the suggested scenario is one of Earth-lament and a certain Gaian ritual undertone, darkly spun, a melancholic memorial to forest death, Nordic nights that spread darkness over whole days as the loved/hated winter impends. The greater ethereality of "With The Stars As Witness" forming a natural closing diptych with the serenity of "The Wilderness" sees Northaunt working a subtle moodshift that suggests overcoming of the cold, the empty and the bleak without denying the dark. Traces Of Nothingness sounds almost like an existential study, and the inclusion of a Sartre quote in the accompanying booklet adds to the philosophical air. Reinforcing the angst, Svartsinn apparently means "black soul" in Norwegian and Jan Roger Pettersen certainly fills this nomenclatural form with congruent musical content. He's here to bring us utter darkness and unforgiving sadness. And he's pretty damn good at it. In discharging his remit, he aims for a disquieting heavy, tenebrous and somber sound. Not so much malevolent as unsettling, promotional material explains ToN as "simply the reaction, result and the path ahead in this ongoing, seemingly endless darkness." So what's ahead is dense, shady nightscapes crawling with atmosphere, yet with more tonal and even harmonic substance than some of the usual CMI suspects, though any overt melody here is naturally sublimated. "Lost in Reveries" is like a constantly shifting flux of sounds, with no real earthbound coordinates, the listener relocated inside a large water tank outside of which a maelstrom churns. "Misanthropic Odyssey" has an almost majestic organic quality with high keenings akin to Robert Rich's steel song. "Through Apathetic Eyes" is a collage of slow-shifting nausea whose unsettling edge is intensified by some gruesome gargoyle gurgling out a dark mantra. The music takes on an unpleasant nightmare edge here, though the following "All The Colours Are Fading" allows more consonant chords to seep through, among an atmosphere of quiet anguish. "...But The Fire Burns No More,"s perhaps representing spiritual abnegation, is the closest any CL artist has got to genuine pathos, as the traces of nothingness close in. An ending (descent). Debut CD Lapse, from label boss Frederic Arbour's Visions project, is right up there with the earlier mentioned Lustmord benchmark. It is dark (yawn), droning (of course), and variously cold, meaty and industrial (though never at the same time), with the odd ritual ambient overtone (cf., Herbst9, Chaos as Shelter et al.). What separates Visions not just from Lustmord, but from the CMI brigade too, is not a whole lot in terms of sonic substance, but that little separation is part of the salvation of some (though not all) of its roster. The suffocating obsession with abject dread and suffering are gratifyingly at a minimum here, and instead we have more of a massive cosmic melancholy. Portentous, ominous, astronomy dominus, the listener is cast adrift out into deep space, on eternal peregrinations between the stars, meditating on human insignificance. The shimmering stretched cymbals like waves breaking across the soundfield on opening track "Abyssal Gaze" and the darkly abstract, sonorous introspection of the closing "Lightless" is outright melodic, albeit timestretched into an ooze, quietly stirred by ululations of astronauts' dead souls. A near-hour of absolute self-perdition go by divertingly neither in an amniotic Ošphoian isolation-languor nor beset with extreme noise terror. "Devoid of Shadows" is a particularly pitch black piece, all rivers of cavernous stygian gloom transposed into interstellar overdrive. Deep revolving drones and cold synth behemoths hove like leviathans over the undulant soundwaves. The percussive sounds are so muted and distant that they are less perceived than sensed. No melodies to relieve, all is swathes, rumblings, and spatial pads. Arbour skillfully conveys a feeling of solitude, creating a sense of the infinite. Title track "Visions" is itself a series of fabulous expanding starbursts over a positively radiant and very alive dronebase, liquid sounds coalescing and expanding organically as if primordial matter itself were in motion before us. Cyclic Law at its best. The Nord Ambient Alliance compilation gathers various artists from the CL fold on an compendium tailor-made for those wanting to know what the label's about. "Barren Land" finds Northaunt, the most organic-environmental of CL's roster, rolling out wintry blasts and rumble over dark tundra and frozen wastes, ushering in harmonized droning and a doleful melody that slowly winds itself out. Cold comfort, but deeply sustaining. "A Shadow Among Shadow" reminds of the Oöphoi drone-style and wouldn't be out of place on the recent Glacial Movements label comp, with its ice-floe polar sequences. Germans Predominance (L.O.K.I. Foundation refugees) offer a couple of esoteric floaters, the first of which, "Trans-Atlantis," triggered my PRD (Portentous Recitation Detector), disfiguring some otherwise nicely cycling drone-matter. The following "Dust of Lost Paradise" is a charmless bleak dirge out of Lustmord's Heresy archive, a protracted dull whorl of sound blown down a headachey cavern. Instincts, Arbour's other project, now defunct, purveys sparser gothic études bordering on the neo-classical. "Arise" is shot through with bleak solemnity, a simple melancholic synth motif with remote industrial buffetings. "Revelation" offers a similar sonic scenario, including the background Bellows of Doom from the previous track, topped off with tolling church bell, transgressing the thin line between cliché and doom-days resonance. Kammarheit, with "I Found It Weeping In The Field," returns us to a by now familiar drone-float backdrop over or under which parade a succession of environmental and industrial signifiers. Kammarheit is aligned with Northaunt's enviro-driftscapes but with a weakness for the odd spooky howl. "Ruina" is less eerie, more lulling and placid, with those trademark crackling ice-melt and water-churning sounds-Kammarheit's more placid nature-loving ruins-exploring side winning over his evil twin. Svartsinn's are the most compositionally variegated pieces, with "Yearning" in particular passing through several distinct movements of brooding liquid turbations in a micro-symphony of dark vapors. Overall, a good illustration of the scope of CL's ambit, with some excellent contributions. Having reached the end of a fantastic voyage, this phonaut is aware of having encountered a dazzling and demonic array of sonic fables, not all of which have been entirely fabulous. It's unclear whether some of the extremely well-realized but occasionally deeply discomfiting music released by Cyclic Law is a serious contribution to a debate about, say, "the prevalent decadence that is around and deep within us" and the "wastefulness" which signifies "the imminent, definitive end of all things" (from New Risen Throne's press releases). The skeptical might see it as merely some kind of pretentious adolescent post-Tolkien Mordor lore-mongering transposed to soundworld. A charitable view would see the music as part of a crusade "to illustrate what dwells within the shadows our consciousness deliberately hides. Facing our most inner fears, hopes, and regrets is a way to get aware of what our environment constantly tries to annihilate and sounds are the most eloquent mean to transcend the rage and the wastefulness. Rumbling machines, deep and mesmerizing soundscapes, distant voices from other eons are our weapons. And they're now loaded..." (from kindred webpage "Archetyp"). But whether Cyclic Law and its like have a genuine Martial Plan or this is merely the new sound of Dungeons and Dragons is a moot point. The depressive nihilism that fuels much of this music would need conversion into galvanic force for good. How does the fantastically well-crafted sound of the hateful, the deathly and the wretched become transformed or is it content to simply wallow in woe worship? Where is the gnostic energy to spin anti- to agonistic? Ultimately this may be just a new breed of Nordic hollow men with money and a genre template to burn on computers and soundtools kidding themselves that a new nasty skin for the the old Aristotelian ceremony of catharsis is something vital and transcendant. It may be, but thinking doesn't make it so. In sum, this "obscure ambient" occupies both extremes of a spectrum of engagement with the world (some have criticized dark ambient for lack of such engagement, but this is misguided). At one end, it engages with the world's insufficiency by holding a mirror up to its excesses or horrors and amplifying it-a music of plangent protest. At the other end it responds to this world by otherworld-making, through creation of and/or retreat into an entirely different, more elemental universe (space, extreme nature)-a music of reflective retreat. From a purely musical perspective, it's the latter-the likes of Kammarheit and Northaunt, with their Nordic updates of On Land, of Gustaf Hildebrand and Arbour's own Visions, boldly going beyond Magnificent Void and Black Stars-that seem to be of greatest interest to those who are fired by their love of electronic music, rather than by love of death. The music of Eros triumphs over that of Thanatos. ALAN LOCKETT • www.cycliclaw.com |
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