New Music From DVOA, Sightless Pit
Dead Voice On Air
Stone Cross Shuttle Worn
(deadvoicesonair.bandcamp.com)
In the end, nature always reclaims the landscape after the forces of industry have given way to changing technology. The old ways become antiquated and the infrastructure is abandoned.
But no matter how defiled, or how rife with pollution the ground may be, nature’s green thicket always overcomes the rusting ruins of commerce.
The process is slow—it can take centuries—but it is absolute. This concept has remained a part of Mark Spybey’s musical drive since the 1980s, recording and bending rhythms, noise, and atmosphere with Newcastle, England’s :zoviet*France:, and into his many releases as Dead Voices On Air.
Stone Cross Shuttle Worn is the third offering in DVOA’s Motherland series, a digital-only rendering of this conflict of man against nature into a motorik musical painting.
“The Sun Is A Flame White Disc” sets the music in motion with a rhythmic clatter and a human voice dissected, invoking a split second of Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “Relax” as it is diced into pieces and sent hurtling into a void of abstraction.
These mechanical motions dissolve into the murky depths of “The Pocket Claws and Fish That Lie” and “Through Wheat Through Rusted Wire”, the latter unexpectedly revealing what has to be the most elegant bit of piano melody in all of Spybey’s catalog.
Improvisation plays a role here but it is delivered as a blend of composition and free-range drifting, guided by the resounding forces at hand.
There is a delicate and abstract beauty percolating inside the 16-minute “As Bird Wings Beat The Solid Air” and “The Trees That Boast A Careful Eye”, punctuated by grinding staccato textures.
All these qualities reinforce forward movement, and an intangible dynamic in the din that builds on the realization that the untamed world is bigger than mankind, and infallible in its slow and elegant traipse through time.
Sightless Pit
Grave of a Dog
(Thrill Jockey)
Press play on “Kingscorpse”, the opening number from Sightless Pit’s debut album, Grave of a Dog, and all the crushing weight of the world comes through loud and clear in Kristin Hayter’s tortured howl.
Despite the deluge of dark feelings the song conjures, this first single heralds the arrival of the most exciting, and the most extreme sounds to emerge from Thrill Jockey’s roster of new acts in many years. The darkness is palpable, viscerally jarring, and not meant for the faint of heart.
Right out of the gate, the Providence, a Rhode Island-based trio—featuring classically trained vocalist Hayter, who also performs as Lingua Ignota, along with Lee Buford of noise-metal duo the Body, and Dylan Walker of grindcore provocateurs Full of Hell—reveals a scathing avant-garde muscle with a collection of music that breaks new ground on multiple fronts.
Songs with titles such as “Violent Rain”, “Drunk On Marrow”, and “Immersion Dispersal” growl with the cadence of black metal, without a single guitar to be heard. Instead, an arsenal of electronic effects draw out the album’s hell-on-earth ambiance.
Other numbers such as “Miles Of Chain” and “Whom the Devil Long Sought To Strangle” grumble to life with a mix of grim, industrial-grade beats and vaporous demonic voices buried in distortion. “The Ocean of Mercy” slowly opens up to reveal more depth and breadth in Hayter’s operatic range.
But there’s an urgent, desperate quality to each of the album’s eight songs, giving rise to a series of white-knuckle ruminations on a life in tumult.
The album’s strengths lie in its natural defiance of the superficial aspects of more easily definable metal, goth, and industrial music tropes.
Grave of Dog is a real-time, heavy-as-hell exploration of pain, negativity, and existential dread, and it is a marvelous thing to behold.