LULL

Brian Duguid (courtesy of ESTWeb pages)

The debut album from MICK HARRIS's solo venture was a dark journey through the Stygian netherworlds of Hell. The listener was left with the impression of a final escape into fresh air reality, a return upon waking, with only whispy trace memories & the heavy rush of blood-pumping fear as a keepsake. With this album, we are plunged back into the weirdly dark pit of noise, all escape barred, all hope trashed. The nightmare continues, the journey through underworlds descends deeper. There are only three tracks on the album, yet it lasts a full 74'41". "Downwards" lasts 16'43", swelling out of the distance on atmospheric breathy sounds, liquid electric trickles & cavern-expanded thunder, suggestive more of chemical reaction than anything biological, rolls across the dimensions. Noises, woodenly percussive, fly with bat-like wings of echo into the darkest, most distant points. The cries of creatures, skeletally dry & pained, herald a churning dance of bone drums. "Journey Through Underworlds" stealthily slides in on animalistic noises, as of human voice distorted by electronics fades in & out. It gradually builds, the leviathan wakening, an immeasurable metabolism dissonant with biological noises. "In The Distance", the longest track at 45'45" takes us into some subterranean Cathedral, peopled by protohuman cenobites, monk-like creatures who chant along while carillons of glass-shard-sharp bells call his felow worshippers to prayer. The glass becomes gas, it's harshness diffuse, gradually building towards a watery, electronically-savage drum-based thing, a possible glimpse into the cauldron of life itself, as the amino-acid-soup & dirty sparks of piezo electric meet, trying to fuse together into the stuff of Creation. Gaining distance, moving away from the eldritch temple of Genesis, we pass through tunnels encrusted with strange crystaline growths, and move towards the heartbeat of the living rock, strangely flat, lacking the echo of the reptilian hissing which accompanies it - more felt through the walls than heard. A mutant drum rhythm grows up, a looping thing, building trance-like while liquids cascade in occasional flows, sudden storms & sparks. This becomes a constant flow, over which other sounds grow. Glockenspiel-like tuned metal sounds bump around in random forms, becoming distant as the listener moves into even darker caverns. Great sheets of pallid white sound fly overhead in stereoscopic migration, huge shapeless life-forms moving in endless amounts & at great speed. Like bone brothers of the opening carillons, strange arpeggios forge a downward spiralling series of patterns, bulding, spreading, aapting into other shapes & forms. It borders n control loss, the striated strips of bone/rock sound swelling almost to dissonance, then ebbing back again, finally disappearing on grating echoes. Where wlll LULL go next? I can only surmise deeper into the Hell they have created. Soundtracks for Nightmares. As a sort of coda to this review, and as an answer to my own final question, I'll mention a possible impending collaboration between LULL & singer MARTYN BATES, provisionally titled "Murder Ballads". If the test recordings (which I've been privileged to hear, and am addicted to) are anything to go by, this could be a classic recording - dark, chilling Folk ballads sung against the deep booms, muted rhythms & sudden lightning jags which is the LULL sound. Timeless & disturbing, this will be an album to save towards.

Antony Burnham (courtesy of Metamorphic Journeyman website)