“Tipping Point” by crone

“Tipping Point” opens a glorious exploration of three dark and sinister soundworlds by experimental electronic duo crone.  Place a pair of comfortable headphones over your ears, dim the lights, close your eyes, and hold on tight…

crone are Lucy Reid and Emily Berryman; initially assembled in Dunedin, then relocated to Wellington.  The three tracks on “crone” (7, 13 and 11 minutes respectively) each build unique yet thematically linked worlds, each one part wonder and part terror.

“Tipping Point” here starts proceedings beautifully, creating an oppressive, threatening landscape of pulses and machines, washed with synth drones and then building steady layers of minimalist beats.

Next, “(in)complete” channels some “Blade Runner” incidental music vibes and damp ambience, before finding a pulse and traces of glitchy disembodied voice. It’s the only human voice on the three tracks and yet it manages to sound the least human thing here in a way; a damaged auto-play facsimile reproduction of a memory of humanity.

Finally, “Masochist Impulse” builds out of the decayed residuals of its predecessor then heads further into noise and deeper into bass frequencies as the listener is dive-bombed by alien insects while being pummeled rhythmically by percussive ultra-bass and heartbeat increasing with the building sense of unease and impending doom.

Altogether it’s a wonderful 30 minutes of immersive music. This absorbing collection was mixed by Danny Brady (Élan Vital, Death and The Maiden) and mastered by Forbes Williams (who also mastered Elan Vital’s brutal cold-wave dance music album “Shadow Self”).

On their first release crone expertly combine futuristic industrial sounds with heavy off-planet atmosphere and pulsing sub-bass to create a thrillingly dark collection of soundscapes. By turns eery, brutalist, tense, and mysterious, while also working effectively as hypnotic dance music capable of inducing a compulsive trance-sway in the listener.

There’s a pile of much-loved Chris & Cosey – Carter-Tutti, and Chris Carter solo albums in the PopLib collection. I rate crone‘s thrilling pneumatic debut up with the best of those.

 

 

“Dear ___ ” (Horse Doctor Remix) – Death And The Maiden

Dunedin software-wizard Horse Doctor (John Glasgow) has remixed Death And The Maiden’s “Dear ___ ” and it’s the most radical remix of anything I’ve ever heard. Ever.

It was so radical it (almost literally) took my breath away. There’s barely enough of the original essence of the song to recognise it from its original album form.

Vocalist Lucinda sounds dislocated, trapped in a resin mold and spinning through space on an alien craft controlled by a malfunctioning short-circuiting computer system. It’s brilliant.

There’s a bit in Simon Reynold’s book “Retromania” where he laments the lack of genuinely new forms of music utlising technology and non-traditional music instrumentation and conventions to craft new exploratory styles. Horse Doctor is the future he imagined was possible.

In this remix – and in the other works assembled on the Horse Doctor Soundcloud – the striking feature is the seriously complex multi-layered Frankenstein Monster re-assembly work. But it goes beyond just looping samples. The first 4 minutes is weird enough. But it really takes off at around the 4 minute mark and goes into a time-distorting, gravity-defying worm hole of sound.

There are many looped micro-samples layered so they form glitchy polyrhythms and then these looped micro-loops are layered with other looped sound into a weird and exciting kind of extra-terrestrial orchestral music, as if performed by a vast orchestra formed by a species of hyper-intelligent space-ants.

“i think i crashed acid pro about 500 times for this one” says Horse Doctor, confirming the diagnosis that this pushes the boundary of music software, and perhaps even sanity. Anyway, it takes a few listens to get into this because it is so different. Yet it is music of great skill and unusual beauty, bearing as much relationship to its orginal re-mix subject song as it does to any notion of pretty much anything else I’m used to.