A Closer Listen
Last weekend we covered the first eleven of Inner Demons‘ massive 33-strong Batch 2024B. Today we’ll cover the middle 11, and next weekend we’ll finish the set. The whole idea of releasing so much music in a single day is absolutely insane, but since it caught our attention, maybe it wasn’t so crazy after all!
Our starting point is the Batch 2024B Preview, which includes a track or excerpt from each of the releases. Today’s action begins with eumourner, a dark trio whose music grows even darker on the full album, aware that Halloween is on its way. While there’s no compromise in the music, there is a sense of building drama. Then suddenly, buried in the onslaught of 33 releases, we find the humble Dan Fox, the head of the Inner Demons label, with his own project Fail. Dan admits that he’s been haunted by his own inner demons, which led to the name of the label. The music is dark and distorted, but by no means a failure; instead, it’s a statement of vulnerability.
Dark music sometimes comes from dark minds, but not always. Sometimes dark music reflects dark minds, dark thoughts or dark situations; other times dark music is fascinated with the dark, and this fascination can produce a surprising light. And sometimes dark music is simply meant to be fun, reflecting the multiple opinions about Halloween, the trick and the treat intertwined. Fox’s label gets this. Fog Baptism‘s Seasleeper is a perfect example. Sylvia Joyce “approaches the project as a diary;” she’s also the second (alphabetical) artist in a row to mention a love of cats. Sometimes a darkness reflected is a darkness (temporarily) tamed. Even though the set begins in “Sunlight” and ends up in a “Trench,” the memory of the sunlight remains.
The title of Goose‘s Hella Free is amusing, as it reflects the words written on the broken cymbals the artist picked up for free. Experimenting with a violin bow, Goose creates a spontaneous mini-suite. The Grey Men‘s The Shape of Noise to Come is one of the batch’s most accomplished releases, a “doom drone” of distorted guitars that honors Sunn O))) and other giants in the genre. Reflecting an “aversion for the spirit of seriousness,” Iah presents playful electronic experiments on the CD Cimilituri, a knob-twisting nightmare that sounds more like a fun house than a horror show.
The clouds return on INFELIX‘s Succumb to Decay, represented on the sampler by the beautifully titled “Crushed on the Shores of Hope.” Sometimes we dwell in the darkness until we feel safe; this album fulfills that need. The brass timbres of Lärmschutz come as a welcome surprise, melded to shards of noise. Ironically, the name means “noise prevention.” Mademoiselle Marchand seems to apologize in the liner notes of Three Cold Winters for making music that may sound “horrible or annoying,” but it’s hard to resist a pair of titles like “Last Year I Died, but This Year I Promise I Won’t Die” / “But if I Die, please Don’t Cry, It’s Just the Moon.” More brass tones, along with tape loops, decorate the single track Shrouded in Silence, which fights against its title in the same way as Lärmschutz; but MCHK knows that counterintuitively, sometimes white noise can help to produce a feeling of silence as well. Mondelbau‘s Scum completes the middle third, Howard Steltzer being Cut Up by Mondelbau. Somehow the fragments form a whole, another lesson of dark music: that there is value in the brokenness, as well as in the healing. (Richard Allen)
Sat Oct 05 00:01:14 GMT 2024