Chris Clark

Empty the Bones of You

/warp; 2003/

 

 

 

more info:
www.warprecords.com

"Must they drag the sky away..."

Autumn is here: it's cold, it's raining, and I'm thinking of a rumanische madchen with sad brown eyes.

"Empty the Bones of You" must be played at a high volume for maximum sonic effect. The production complements perfectly the cartography of the sound world depicted herein: scrunched-up beats meshed with a broken lyricism. Listen to 'Farewell Track' - incidental music to a botched suicide - with its powerful finale which (unfortunately) fades out. Fade-outs are unforgivable in the twenty-first century, but rewind to around 1:11 and start again. In a strange way it reminds me of PiL's 'Hymie's Him', harsh and beautiful at the same time.

Other tracks - 'Gavel (Obliteated)' for example - are redolent of early Esplendor Geometrico and even Faust. It's a music of depth, thought and feeling - real, not simulated (forget Baudrillard.) It's an adventure full of sudden violence and fucked-up beauty, sustained by fragile (but real) hope. And it all ends with the plaintive hurt-filled sound of 'Betty', the aural equivalent of a poem by Ingeborg Bachmann.

It's raining, streetlamps shimmer over the wet roads. And you think: tonight someone is crying, someone is dying, someone is falling in love, someone is happy.

-Andrew Russell

/oct 1st 2003/