Artist: Infiltrator
Title: Black Light Therapy
Genre: Noise / Experimental
Release Date: 14th April 2011
Label: Complete Control Productions
Album Review
I read in the press release almost mythical stuff. That it took for the band about 20 (!) years for a “proper” release of this work, that it was in extreme limited circulation in cassettes in the Swedish underground scene in the 80’s and the 90’s, that the members of the band were in and out of psychiatric wards and that they refuse to be known to the point that I have no idea at all of even how many they are (though I think they are two) and that they present themselves as a sect rather as a band. I also read something else as well; that this CD is a “harrowing document of addiction and accelerating mental illness”, an introvert exhibition of depression. Even if all of the above is correct this release is sheer brilliance and it does injustice to this work to represent it as an accelerating mental illness. And at this point one does not know where the truth ends and the marketing begins.
Yet harrowing it is. It opens with sounds similar to the nights of ‘Silent Hill’ in order to slip progressively into more Noise and experimental aspects. What is striking in the whole process is that the aspects of tonality, which are like islets in this CD, are forcing the listener to feel more uncomfortable within these than those of atonality. And they are accompanied by howls and incomprehensible words. Indeed, something is falling apart but this is not their minds under the Nordic winter but the world that surrounds them crushing the physical and mental existence of the creators. The feeling that ‘Little Ballet Dancer’ provokes is that this dancer is unable to do anything in a world of rumours, media and noise that erase not only the music but the feeling as well. It is like a journey to the past, a crushed past that is, mournful yet under the realisation that it is irrevocably lost as it is under pointed by the slow piano section of its ending.
The blind anger of ‘Losing you’ escalates in the ‘Dirty magic’ in order to reach the peak of the chaotic noises of the ‘End’. And after that, in ‘Drown’ - which will remind you the opening of DEPECHE MODE’s ‘Stripped’ - the “narrators” instead of a happy ending seem to choose to accept world that they cannot change, to live there even as its victims. In the end there’s no one to be addressed with “come with me into the trees...” and the solitude is the most natural of all choices. In short, this is the music that Ibsen’s “Peer Gynt” might have written as he lays defeated by the world. In a more visual level, if a single image was suitable of being delivered with this music I think that this might as well be the image of a comet above our heads. With its dark sides and its luminous ones changing positions, in a constant flux, resembling but never equal either the Sun or the Night. And the last track, the head of the comet, comes as a bitter realisation that we are incapable of both genuine tragedy and salvation, only of their pitiful, hurtful and painful caricatures.
Is this depressive? Hardly so. It is a work of Art that rightfully rivals many avant-garde artists and works of the past. It is ironic that I’ve known either personally or have reviewed the work of many so-called artists, with zero talent and an Eiffel Tower of ego and attitude, cocksure parading dumb down brigades, and there are true artists, who are the real stuff full of insecurities dressed as theories. But I can’t blame them; indeed Guy Debord was right - “All that was once directly lived has become mere representation”. As I already said, under these circumstances solitude and oblivion are the most natural choices. Yet, it is such a shame...
Tracklist
01. You know you want to – 6:38
02. Falling apart – 6:19
03. Little Ballet Dancer – 6:00
04. Losing you – 2:16
05. Dirty magic – 7:53
06. End – 8:32
07. Drown – 5:26
Websites
http://www.ccproductions.org
Cover Picture
Rating
Music: 10
Sound: 10
Total: 10 / 10
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