FEAR
FALLS BURNING & BIRCHVILLE CAT MOTEL – s/t
(CD,
conspiracy)
A lot of people I know admitted that they waited up for
this record to appear. From the beginning the combination of Fear Falls Burning
and Birchville Cat
Motel sounds too good to be true and after the mouthwatering
release of Fear
Falls Burning with Nadja earlier this year, it is hard to not be
excited.
Fear Falls Burning aka Vidna Obmana aka Dirk Serries I
guess has the plan to collaborate with anybody willing to do so, with the
fallback version of collaborating with everybody he is able to make them
collaborate with him. (see above). But that is okay because up to now his
partners are also of the most inspiring and talented kind and the results
are always worth listening. Maybe he has only become tired of fooling around
all for himself over all the years he has explored guitar sounds. Because,
after all, the innermost core of Fear Falls Burning’s music is the pure
though heavily amplified guitar sound that vibrates from speakers with
almost bodily form.
And in this he goes for the most basic set up that is
documented in rock history from Led Zeppelin to AC/DC, the Gibson / Marshall
combination that forms the basic spine of the sound that we know nowadays as
hardrock or heavy metal. It is interesting to note on this setup, because
musically Serries also goes as far away from the structural setup of
hardrock as possible. Wether he records searing waves of crushing guitar
sounds or if he merges into mesmerizing drones of low guitar feedback, he is
nowhere near the heavy metal heavy rotation of alternative rockradio. It is
as if he strips this genre of all its pretensions, the image and make up,
the lifestyle hallucination and the musical dogmas and what remains are big
waves of sounds flowing forth from the amplified, electrified and magnified
intestines of the bad ass guitar / big ass amplifier combination.
Kneale Campbell aka Birchville Cat Motel is not unknown
for extremism either. Working solo, in a hundred more collaborations (same
plan here as mentioned above with Serries), on his label Celebrate Psi
Phenomenon or under various monikers like Black Boned Angel, he has
manipulated more sounds than General Electric has engineers. He does not
restrict himself to the most typical setup of effects or soundsources for
his music, but takes everything that is at hand, from old guitars to cheap
effect pedals, and what is not available he’ll build up himself. On this
collaboration at hand he uses various guitars, some drums, all kinds of
effects and some field recordings. During his recording career Campbell has
become familiar with drone. Now he has found a perfect partner to play with.
This CD contains a single track of over fifty minutes
of swelling drone that is basically all guitar sounds, but turns into a
megalomanic, multilayered complex swaggering mountain of sound you would
need an ocean to drown it in. After a long time of slowly expanding and
multiplying noises, you are confronted with a vast wall of sounds that flood
your room and your brain. But interestingly, no matter how big in size the
sounds become, everything still remains very translucent, light and
transparent. Moods change slowly from a sparkling, sunfilled morning at the
beach to a heavily thundering and darkening thunderstorm threatening to
drown the post-urban metropolis and all its decay.
