Drowning Venice
The imaginary soundtrack of a sinking city.
PS003 (2002)
Industrial.org
I have never been to Venice, and from what I understand about the water quality I have some pretty strong reservations about getting my head wet but this new disc from Mugen does urge me to at least consider dipping my toes in. Although it's quite obvious who's behind it (after chewing through "770"), it comes off almost like a compilation in that the approach is far from the tight focus of the previous disc. Twitchy digitizations make their expected appearance but surprise guests in the form of solemly chanting monks, Japanese exported noise terrorism and decade long amplitude envelopes deform the outline into something less easy to hold and place.
The disc runs for 37 minutes before running out of ideas though the first track plays a sine wave tortoise with rigamortis for the first minute or two. Once the events do actually get underway, it's via purely digitized waveforms, sharp yet sparse events that ring off like a dropped screw hitting the heat sink on a powered motherboard over top of a cooling fan being fed red meat. The second track is pure dark ambient, synthesized male voices bouncing off the stone walls of some underground corporate chapel. The third track slams the door shut, letting the inorganic machinations once again overwhelm through silence, textural blurblings and ultra high frequencies. Track 4 cracks the containment field, the force of the gushing forth linear segments leading to overt distortion, an almost grindcore approach to glitch that ultimately falls backwards into the realm of pure noise. A softer rythmic sensibilty permeates the next piece, short pink noise bursts tip toeing their way around undulating sheets of metal and vertical streams of LED generated light. Again, aggressive tendencies rudely push their way to the forefront, the sixth track a bubbling, caustic pool swirling around with the odd angry burst of sulphuric steam making a vain attempt to vent off trapped energy. Instead of release, rhythm eventually cements the distortion permanently into place creating a Pompei scene out of the remaining form. The final track here reverts back to control room machine language, a saturated fingers appearing over the top of the console but ultimately being glued to the phospor of the IDE.
"Drowning Venice" is far more noisy than I expected, more Japanese than American fuck-shit-death noise but still about as far along the polarization from polite "clicks and cuts" to tweeter shedding as possible. The noise initially kicks the door down but I personally prefer the gritty creep of later tracks where inhuman calm slowly disintegrates. The dark ambient piece is a bit of an oddity, satisfying yet unexpected in this context and I would have liked to have heard some further integration of this approach with the other aspects to lend it more overall cohesion. Taken as a whole I feel the previous Mugen disc "770" was more complete but this is still a rather interesting and at times challenging path to follow.
Blow Up Magazine n.46 (Mario Biserni)
Ben diverso il discorso per quanto riguarda Mugen, il quale definisce la propria musica come una mescolanza di dark ambient, minimalismo e japan noise: un cocktail che, nonostante l'assenza di d'n'b, ci ricorda quella vechhia strega di Witchman. E probabilmente anche Mugen possiede una buona conoscenza di arti stregonesche, oltre a una buona dose di pazienza, se riesce ad amalgamare elementi cosi' diversi creando un ibrido in cui il perfetto equilibrio fra i coefficienti ha del miracoloso. Peccato che un lavoro cosi' coinvolgente sia destinato solo ai "naviganti curiosi" (ma l'autore e' alla ricerca di un'etichetta interessata alla distribuzione). (7/8)