Phauss / Karkowski / Bilting - Phauss • Karkowski • Bilting FLAC

This album is perhaps less extreme than I had come to expect from the ANCKARSTRÖM stable, but is still both strange & uneasy on tbe ears.
The first track of three from BILTING / KARKOWSKI is "Als Der Himmel Brannte", opening with mind-piercing high-pitched tone above treated whispered voices which seen to lurk in the shadows, drawing their cruel plans against the listener. Through this rise & fall various machine-like rhythms, following slow, steady beats of cold, harsh noise. Next is "Oongie's Grandson", the shortest track on the album at 6'00". It is based around a constant clicking rhythm with slower, deeper drum following. Around this various sounds - some synthetic, some (violin) presumably acoustic - add to the wild, uncontrolled clockwork madness of the track. The tempo picks up towards the end, breaking up, resolving, finally dying in mechanical agony. "Up From Below" again uses a high-pitched note (which, like the second track, dopplers when you turn your head from speaker to speaker). Under this grow various configurations of short wave radio signals - a hot pot of Morse all blending in peaceful confusion to portray an image of electronic stew, the primordial soup, alive with strange semi-life. PHAUSS offer their first and only track, the longest here stretching out to 24'16". It is an adventure into the darkest depths of Industrial music - a journey through cold, eldritch factory sites, led to each machine by naked bulbs offering enough light to depress the soul and to see the arcane, twisted malengines at their dark work, their toothy mechanisms set to chew the flesh of the careless. And what might these terrible, deceptively quiet machines make? Step closer and take a look. The final track, just over a minute shorter than PHAUSS's offering is ZBIGNIEW KARKOWSKI's "Immortals By My Side", an amorphous washing mass of noises which almost form a rhythm, like the primordial soup from track 3 after a million or so years of development. Through this broth of sub-white noise rise bassy rumbles, harsh chitterings as of locust swarm or malign cicadas. Rising through this slowly but steadily comes a factory, as if evolving instantaneously from the amino chains, a huge, white bone building housing malign biological mechanisms, like fused bodies of insects - colony-becomes-machine. Eventually it fades away, before bearing whatever strange offspring such a creation might manufacture.

An extreme album, although a little less so than ANCKARSTRÖM's own releases. It's available from SILENT RECORDS,or can perhaps be ordered through your local record shop, although I have no idea of their distributors.

Originally reviewed for Soft Watch.