Saturday 17 August 2013

Shapednoise - Until Human Voices Wake Us (Opal Tapes)


Shapednoise unleashes a battalion of evil alien killing machines designed to annihilate all within listening distance - resistance is futile. Although Until Human Voices Wake Us is almost a direct quote from the final line of T. S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock this music translates the stanza's talk of 'sea-girls' into a very different scenario. Whilst Eliot imagines a dreamy aquatic realm, the 'chambers of the sea', Shapednoise creates a terrifyingly seductive soundscape of mechanoid mayhem. 

Brutal yet sleek, rhythmic and riotous, it begins with the pounding of a heart under attack and never lets up. But the internal logic to all this noise ensures that it succeeds in fusing Industrialised techno with textures that might otherwise prove too punishing. Like a homage to Futurism, it revels in the power and glory of speed machines which roll through the pastoral landscape of easy listening, laying to waste soporific tranquillity as they do so. The minimal use of old-fashioned beats lends a lean, muscular feel to the whole affair, aided further by moments of stripped-down sound. 


2 comments:

  1. "Like a homage to Futurism, it revels in the power and glory of speed machines which roll through the pastoral landscape of easy listening, laying to waste soporific tranquillity as they do so. The minimal use of old-fashioned beats lends a lean, muscular feel to the whole affair, aided further by moments of stripped-down sound."
    these are excellent sentences. you inspire me to write more clearly and concisely about music.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Glad to hear it. Thanks for the comment.

    ReplyDelete

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