“Yes you did read that right: digital noise virtuosos Russell Haswell and Florian Hecker have released an album on Warner. Fear not though, this set of recordings finds the duo on arresting form, fashioning further developments from the sounds they pioneered back in their Mego days. This album is possibly even more technically baffling than anything produced back then, and anyone familiar with Hecker’s “Sun Pandamonium” or Haswell’s “Live Salvage 1997-2000″ will realise that’s no mean feat. “Blackest Ever Black” is an experiment in synaesthesia, with the two sonic explorers working on the cutting edge compositional software Upic, a system for digitally transferring visual data into an auditory language. Upic was conceived by that giant of 20th century composition Iannis Xenakis, who devised it as a means of reading graphic images and synthesizing them directly into sound. Haswell and Hecker set about collating a number of extreme images, all somehow definitive of, or influential on this point in history, ranging from pornography to photographs of the Madrid train bombings and nuclear testing sites. All this pictorial information was then fed into Upic alongside the artists’ own abstract drawings. This process might sound at best overly conceptual, at worst in very poor taste, but it’s all integral to the duo’s end goal: to find a true sonic equivalent of the more troubling imagery that shapes and defines our time. You might interpret this album as a remorselessly scientific slant on the principles of nihilistic metal, as if its reason for being is to produce some sort of cathartic blast, but the music here differs vastly from the standard makeup of sonic dystopianism – it genuinely sounds like it’s made from the very fabric of our age. This is the sound of telecommunication devices gone wrong, technology dismantling itself. If all that sounds rather cold and austere, well frankly, it’s supposed to. “Blackest Ever Black” is very far removed from the improv-driven noise music that finds favour nowadays, and that’s its greatest asset. This is absolutely rigorous and uncompromising in its academic approach to sound design, and right now, in a noise scene dominated by outlandish power electronics performances from arch showmen like Wolf Eyes and Prurient, the apparent dour stoicism of a release like this feels like the most extreme statement you could make in electronic music right now. Stone-cold devastating.”
(Review on Boomkat)
-Firstly… this was released on Warner?
Is there a term to describe the aesthetic appreciation of fascism and inhumane devastation within our cultural/political history? I had the most uneasy experience listening to Blackest Black Ever knowing that the sounds they generate are decoded from photo documents of genocides. For me, synesthesia is just one dimension to that experience. To actually appreciate the systematic result of this data decoding, much like the microscopic stuff released on Raster Norton, results in a weird parallel with the fascism underlying this project and my own appeal towards containment. It is making me feel like i play a part in the inhumanity of culture: my present consciousness interlinked with the persistence of the barbarism inherent in history.
