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MERZBOW & LAWRENCE ENGLISH "Eternal Stalker" LP
€19.99
€25.99
On their first official collaboration, Japanese noise pioneer Masami Akita aka Merzbow and Australian sound sculptor Lawrence English present a harrowing, surrealist portrait of nocturnal industrial activity, spawned by field recordings made in a sprawling factory complex seven hours north of English's home in Brisbane. He characterizes the area as "uneasy and unsettling," awash in the sickly glow of smelters and refinement machinery, somehow not of this world - a liminal quality vividly captured in Andrei Tarkovsky's sprawling purgatorial opus, Stalker, to which the title alludes. Akita, too, described early drafts of Eternal Stalker as feeling "like the soundtrack to a dystopian science fiction opera." A mood of mechanical dread and ruined futures permeates each of the album's seven potent compositions. Opener "The Long Dream" sets the stage with steady rain on sheet metal, punctured by thunder and metallic echoes, reverberating to the rafters in a collapsing warehouse. Quickly the tempest rises. "A Gate Of Light" and "Magnetic Traps" both convulse in churning furies of electric demolition and rattling chains, roaring and relentless. "The Visit" and "Black Thicket" operate more at a distance, surveying the topography of steam, rust, and liquid metal from above, their flickers of violence swallowed by blankets of darkness. This is noise at its most elemental and unknowable: brooding, bristling, and opaque, stalking forbidden peripheries of chaos and creation. Discussing Akita's music, English refers to its "intense substrata that is purely psychedelic; it consumes and confounds." The seasick swells of friction and fracture subsume the listener, forcing an auditory surrender: "this saturation of the senses can be a euphoria." Proof comes halfway through "The Golden Sphere," when the howling mayhem subtly recedes, revealing an eerie siren drone hovering in the void, like the resonance of a dead star galaxies away. Slowly a seething, venomous wall of volume returns, shredding the signal until its frequencies fray, whipping away into the eye of the storm. The combined effect merges obliteration and liberation, rapture and ravagement; it's the sound of dissolution as resolution, uprooted and unmoored, finally freed from form.
IMPORTANT INFORMATION - VINYL ORDERS
Please note that we do our best to protect vinyl records ideally for shipping, using our custom made mailers and additional cardboard squares. However, we can not guarantee that no damage on the way occurs. Ordering is at one's own risk. Vinyl might be delivered unsealed as we have to open copies to check vinyl colours, if not sufficiently labeled by the distributor / label.
IMPORTANT INFORMATION - PRE-ORDERS
Pre-order means that your item will not ship before it's release date and so will all other items on your order. We do not split up orders, everything will be shipped all at once together in one package.
IMPORTANT INFORMATION - PRODUCT IMAGES
Please note that most of the images in our store are not actual photos but mock ups. These mock ups are digital representations of what we expect the final product to look like - however they do not represent the final product. Final vinyl pressings, prints, etc. may look slightly different.
