Station Grau by Praying for Oblivion

It isn't often I review the works of people on my social media friends list--I will always share a link or info about their projects, but, rarely, will I do as much as offer an opinion. Something inside me resists doing this; perhaps I'm simply scared that I'll offend them somehow. In the case of music, or even experimental power electronics or noise, or musique concrete, there is the added burden of describing the indescribable; of judging something that, frankly, is so anti-commercial, so outside the conventional, that to try and assess it based on normal standards is somewhat ludicrous. At any rate, I found myself tonight listening to a link provided by PE artist Andrew Jonathan-Seal, who is, I take it, an expatriate living somewhere in Europe. I've found him to be an interesting individual as far as the people I know strictly electronically; he's always been tolerant of me, and the pictures I've seen of his performances are impassioned and impressive.

Station Grau begins with a seventeen-minute harsh noise wall, "Zodiak," with appropriate grit lurking beneath, as of the scraping of some huge stone megalith across a concrete surface. This is an appropriate touch; I dislike those sorts of walls where the sound is simply an electronic jet-stream explosion of static and a rumble. With something approaching organic, the sound becomes redefined, occupying a particular space, a particular frame of physical reference in the actual linear world beyond electronic devices.

The denouement of the track features a sort of flat, atonal PE vocal, but I'm uncertain as to what is being said or conveyed here, as I found it indiscernible. The audience claps at the end, letting us know that what we've just experienced was live.

("Zodiak" may have been a paen to American serial killer "Zodiac," who, as most everyone knows, was never apprehended. If so, the cryptographic ambiance of the track can be spiritually juxtaposed against the raw senselessness of the maniac's murderous spree.)

"Station Grau 1" is not nearly as organic, has a spider web of electronic and radio squeals beneath a churning loop of feedback (or perhaps one evolves from the other). Beneath, a kind of hollow pumping sound adds a diseased, half-assed rhythmic undertone. It reminds me of a sonic hole, with a hypersonic tunnel leading to a place of aural torment. But, it is not harsh beyond endurance; there is more dynamism than that; a kind of chance syncretic arrangement, continually blasted out by the acid spray of the feedback assault.

"Station Grau 2" runs, perhaps, a minute longer, and is simply a continuation of the same. The same gritty feedback, the building and receding science-fictional tone of an electric modulated sound, careening in and out over what feels to be a central hum building to an ever-increasing intensity, like an ejaculatory release that never quite occurs, just continues to build to a leveled-off climax.

It ends as abruptly as any noise album. Jliat (British conceptual artist James Whitehead), once advised sound artists on the old Noiseguide forum (now defunct) NOT to use fade-outs on their tracks, as they were a bourgeois convention. Very sound advice (no pun).

This is an excellent little three-track album, available for download at the link below. There is also a limited edition run of twenty-five audiocassettes for six dollars.

As Todd Novasad once told me, "It's good stuff." I use his gift for understatement quite a lot, in an ironic sense. Noise and PE, in my thinking, function with the same tragi-humorous irony as ALL surrealistic or avant-garde statements. (If you doubt this, just listen, for example, to the new Non album, Blast of Silence. It's intensely sterile, somehow; not something that can be warmed to in any way. But is it art? You decide. I promise it may not leave you praying for oblivion, but, it might leave you contemplating it.)

Fin.

Station Grau by Praying for Oblivion