Album Review: Equal Stones- Transgression
Much to my surprise, the other day, the head of the Hidden
Vibes label hit me up via Twitter, to inquire about sending in an album for
review. Much to his surprise, I had heard of Hidden Vibes thanks to the
continued excellence of Justin Snow over at the experimental/drone/ambient site
Anti-Gravity Bunny.
The album in question here is Transgression, the new four-track effort from Equal Stones, the
work of a Netherlands-based artist named Amandus Schaap.
To say that this is “heavy duty” is beyond an understatement.
Exploring the darker, less comforting side of experimental
and ambient music, Schaap’s work with Transgression
haunts and disconcerts (specifically haunting with the disembodied vocal sounds
on the opening piece, “Set Free.”) It’s borderline abrasive at times, and once
the pieces get going, the thick and claustrophobic atmosphere can be
unrelenting.
Which is to say, it’s pretty good.
I mean, if you are really into unsettling experimental
music.
The entire set is incredibly solid, and very well assembled,
but it really hits its stride on the second piece, “We All Fall.” After slowly
building up a wall of static, scratches, and what is described in the press
release as “microsounds,” long stretches of mournful guitar drones and synth
waves come cascading in. It’s one of the few moments on Transgression that captures how ambient music can both be
incredibly beautiful and heartbreaking, while still managing to be rather
unnerving.
On the multi-movement “Reject All You Have Learned,”
oscillating layers of feedback give way to various blasts of shimmering, then
later aggressive sounding static, before finally finishing out on a rather
dreadful, ominous note in the final few minutes.
Transgression
closes up with the incredibly jarring, cacophonic “Death at Both Ends;” seven
minutes that juxtaposes a heavily processed and decaying drum loop, with layers
and layers of droning and screeching feedback that only become louder and more prevalent
over time, before it all slowly fades into the distance, becoming a memory you
are unable to shake.
As I’ve alluded to before with other reviews of
ambient/experimental/drone albums, once you discover one artist within the
genre, or one label, it’s only a matter of time before you find more, and then
you are sucked into a never-ending abyss of Bandcamp pages and limited edition
cassette releases. Equal Stones’ Transgression
is a very definitive statement on the sheer power that music like this has,
showing the ability to create a fractured, unconventional beauty from the
harshest of sounds.
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