Blamstrain: Disfold

Info:

Author:	Alan Lockett
Magazine:	e/i Magazine
Review language:	English
Artist:	Blamstrain
Rating:	no rate given
Review date:	01 Feb 2007

Review:
It’s taken Helsinki-based Juho Hietala fully three and a half years to produce this follow-up to the precociously confident, if somewhat brash and clattering debut Ensi (Merck, 2003). Notably more expansive than the debut, Disfold is quite a trip. Referring to it as a “trip” is not indicative of a regression into drug-addled hippy mode, but seeks to point to a listening experience which induces immersion and motion through the medium of sound. But on top of this, it is a trip which is explicitly documented on Disfold, signalled as such right down to the detailed artwork of Jeroen Advocaat that complements the music with a hybrid of fantasy and realism that has become Sending Orbs’ visual signature style. It lays out the sonic journey within as a series of stops on a subway map, public transport, incidentally, offering a suggestive design paradigm—conceptual, visual and musical—for a musician looking for a way-out from the Circle Line of IDM orthodoxy to a further-out destination. The front cover is adorned with a shot of a metro train on a platform, to a backdrop of tenebrous night skies and steepling cityscape. The back represents the tracks as stations en route, from embarcation and departure at “Diacedita,” to journey’s end at “A Song for Jonas.”

Now, the Blamstrain of Ensi could essentially be reduced to an above-par synth + beats + DSP plug-in merchant, so the extent to which Disfold branches out sure-footedly into the larger environment, both literally and metaphorically, is a genuine surprise. It would be fairly accurate to characterize the contents of Disfold as a series of drawn-out muffled passages, copiously treated with delay and reverb, consisting of sparse electronically-generated harmonic tones fused with a profusion of field recording harvestings from Hietala’s DAT-player, attended by occasional muted pounding and repetitive thumps. No reductionism intended, though, for it should be stressed that the contribution of this “environmental” stratum is galvanic, providing the album with a flow motion that fuels its momentum, so that it progresses train-like, thrumming with the externalia of public spaces. The sounds contained seem to include “real” samples virtualized into replications of the likes of singing wheels, buzzing electricity morphing with the surface noise generated by an old groove-entrenched needle, the ambient urban soundscape, voices variously articulated, and any amount of wind-like timbres from soft (breathing) to loud (whooshing). When articulated through an architecture of reverb and delay, and combined with minimal musical material, the end result is endowed with a hyper- dreamlike quality.

In Disfold, Hietala has wrought an impressively detailed work that combines a feel for suggestive environmental ambient with some of the methodology of dub, infused with a post-techno sensibility (Chain Reaction is one of the guardian angels overseeing this subway). A piece such as “Revelation 21:1” illustrates Disfold’s atmospheric zenith, wherein we reach the vanishing point of rhythmic and harmonic material, and are immersed in the teeming clattering billowing heart of the city. This is a seething, literally transportive album that situates the listener deep in some future-based Blade Runner-esque metropolis channeled as sprawling and overwhelming, yet simultaneously intoxicating, even exhilarating. (AL) • www.sendingorbs.com