Not Breathing – Carrion Sounds

This album, as long with Christy Cores, really deserves a vinyl press !

You are going to be infinitely disappointed if you listen to this and hope it's going to be some sort of industrial/dark ambient spookfest that will transport you to a magikal land of ye olde terror. Oh my lord, will you be wrong and unhappy.

But don't discredit it for being one of the best unsung idm albums of the last decade. I'm not sure how to even begin describing how much better this is than anything Merck has ever put out (aside from liveMD.) It's like you take the sheer ugliness of Venetian Snares but subtract the angst and lightspeed breaks, and then you give the rest to someone who has more rhythmic tricks than start/stop/speed up/slow down. Or it's sort of like what Nic Endo would make if she tried to make a dance album.

Which is to say that yes, it definitely has a certain ugly aesthetic. There are a lot of groaning synths, synths and drums that have just be straight-up stepped on until they're like 4bit wav files, stuff that's just completely off key, Metroid sfx, nasty 80s horror synth ephemera, mid-fi everything else, and incredible drum programming. Not a technical "hey ma, lookit me drillin these here snares," but a genuine, god-given sense of musical space and how to fill it, chop it, flip it and kill it.

I bought this album when I was shopping in a second hand bookstore with my friend. Catching sight of the cover I plunged my hand to the bottom of the bargain bin, and emerged with it, triumphant as a pearl diver. My friend said, “Ew, what would you want with that ugly thing?” Her callous comment only convinced me further that I’d found a true treasure. When we got back to her place, I couldn’t wait to pop it in the CD player. I’m sorry to say it was rather a letdown. “What do you know,” said my friend, “it looks horrible, and it is horrible.”
It’s wholly possible that there’s some kind of arcane subtlety to this album which I just don’t get. Certainly, a lot of care went into the making of it, it is rich in complexity, and it seems clear to me that the artist(s) had a definite vision in mind. I just didn’t feel it. What bugged me the most was the inconsistency of the music, with the artwork and the title. Some of the background music was actually reasonably spooky. There is some kind of ghostly operatic vocal drifting in and out, on the fifth track, “Space Between II”, but it’s horribly marred by the main feature sound—A kind of imitation washboard noise, which is rivalled in ugliness, only by the beat, which is tinny, flat, and inexplicably speeds up and slows down. These two noises are evidently the focal point of the piece as they are featured on every track.
I couldn’t figure out what any of the music had to do with “Carrion Sounds”, as none of it evoked anything particularly menacing or Gothic for me at all. There were some elements in the album which I liked, but none of them gelled with the other parts, and ultimately I was left with a feeling of cheese. My personal opinion is that if you want to create an atmosphere of magic, or menace, and you want to do it electronically, you need to use a synthesizer that is damned posh. It should be so smooth as to cause the listener to forget what is making the sound and convince them that the music could only be achieved by supernatural means. On that score, it failed for me, and worse than that, it sounded dated.
On the other hand, Jesse Peper’s artwork is absolutely stunning, both front and back, and I’m still glad I bought the album just to have such a cool looking CD in my collection. At the very least, I would say there are some elements of the music which reflect the artwork; unfortunately, they are not the main features.