Various Artists - ০

A Closer Listen

The face in the album cover is rather a distorted mask, a grimace with eyes no longer organic, but loosened flesh. With bare, paradoxically frail-looking aluminum teeth, it is immersed in a gray vacuum that indicates there is no person behind, only a world that has no depth to it, all in blank. Poetically titled as an empty circle, symbolically doubling as zero, this compilation by Biswa Bangla Noise, exploring mostly emerging experimental artists from Kolkata and West Bengal, presents a musical current of defaced noise. That the sole black metal musician included in the mix throws us the most abrasively “conventional” track in the entire album should be of note: the kind of high-intensity electronic warfare associated with the genre is here subverted, sublimated from an infinitely profound abyss into an ungraspable surface, extending anxiously forever.

The effacement begins with a genre staple tactic, a voice sample, this time acting out sections of a Raymond Carver short story, cut-up into obsessively repeating bits and layered upon indistinct crowd noise. It’s Hungry Thoughts’ “Gin Talk”, which also features a repetitive alarm-like drone that gratingly transforms into a relieving short piano melody. It resembles ambient, but its layers are not exactly suitable for deep-diving; they all push against each other, an uncertain stability emerging from their clash. Diving here would only net you a broken body, because the void of noise here means not a density brimming with vibration but a flatness that sharply pierces through attentive listening. Where the experience of noise music approaches self-erasing meditation (diffuse attention), its defaced version approaches self-expanding compulsion (acute attention). The following track, “ঘামের মেশিন” (“Sweat Machine”), by Flesheatingturtles, grinds listeners with a slow industrial beat, around which chaotic feedback and electronics flutter, only to turn, by the very end, into an eerie, minimal percussive melody. The contrast pulls us away from the abrasive let-it-all-go vibe of the rest of the track, revealing that the structure of the entire piece was not beneath the surface but right in front of us all along, its chaos just another listening perspective of that very melody.

“জল পরিবহন” (“Water Carriage”) by Bengal Chemicals begins with electronic droplets, developing into an echoing swarm of sound with various degrees of clarity – the end is muddled, swept away by a glitching breeze. Immediately after, “Reflections in a Siren’s Call” by Human Harmonics picks up the trail with a blast of high-pitched noises that relatively quickly turn into a synthy New Age phrase. The noise swells beneath, but it is carefully kept under the sway of the synth bells, recontextualizing its aggression as an expansion of imaginative states, rather than a provocation of bodily reaction. The trend is followed by Eeshani Mitra’s “Wrong Friends”, which sounds like an arrangement of wind chimes and sudden vocal interventions, perhaps the sweetest track in the entire album, an uncertain stability once again, productively flattening its elements. This is where the sublimation in o lies, mobilizing the destructive creativity of noise towards a nothingness that feels warm, enticing, like the mask’s loosened eye-flesh, powerfully frail like its aluminum teeth.

The second half of the album stridently opens with Bangladeshi black metal artist Debopom Ghosh Must Be Killed’s “আমার মৃত্যুর থেকেও কালো” (“Blacker Than My Death”), an aggressive power electronics bombardment with monster vocals and distorted wails. The Blue Raja’s “নীল পাহাড়ের দাবানল” (“Blue Mountain Fire”) follows through with a wall of vibrant noise, piercing drones, and deconstructed vocals, waging that all-out battle against music that noiseheads will be quite familiar with. When Revant’s “Feeders” begins, its high-freq sounds, creaks, and pops will feel like a restful stop, surprisingly developing into a polyphony of bright, loud drones that morph any remaining, widening abrasiveness into an industrially smooth type of sound – noisy, chaotic, and yet quietly, interestingly superficial. The second to last track, “A Maze of Drones and Despair” by TITO+, feels most like an ambient track, finishing the process of transforming past aggression initiated by the previous piece. Its multiple layers channel all that fury into a feeling of being trapped without being restrained, anxiously flattened into gray nothingness.

Ritwik Mishra’s “दो 60 एक 30” (“Two 60s One 30”), the final track, cycles back to that sense of an antagonistic whole with which the album began, a whole in which the parts do not fit well, their tension a source for refreshing (un)certainty. It features a melodic guitar solo that wouldn’t be too out of place in a Ghost set, alongside creaking electronics and bright drones whose uneasiness by now feels comfortable. This is noise that wraps its glitchy, warm limbs around you, a welcoming embrace into the void. The demolition of music results no longer in pitch-black, chaotic density: beneath your mask there is only a gray continuity with the rest of existence, an all-encompassing surface, the fragile skin of the entire world. (David Murrieta Flores)