Seasons (pre-din) - Lesser and Still

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4...according to our Brian on Thu 10 Mar, 2011.

I once wrote a really silly review for this chap's album on Type. It was very truthful and rather affectionate, merely describing what I was hearing/experiencing in comedy layman's terms rather than overintellectualising the work like the clever kids do. This ruse actually worked a treat once, I learned, when a man came up to me in Brighton saying he'd had Cindytalk on his experimental internet radio show & they'd read my review for a sound-art inclined 10" of theirs live on-air. My butt clenched & my blood momentarily froze in horror as I recalled my ridiculous, rambling, irreverent review... until he guffawed & informed me the band had been in tears of laughter at my lumpen, harried description of their lovingly sculpted sound-world. My story therefore makes a good review because to try & intelligently convey this dissonant, ominous & foggy dystopian trip is pretty difficult! Grainy muted snippets of dialogue chunter over a calm wash of radio hiss & white noise? You got it. Thrumming, malevolence & fuzzed-out industrial abstraction? Knock yourself out! The final track knocks back the aural mist & introduces some of the most sombre & beautiful synth work I've heard this year, with some more tastefully applied disembodied dialogue, albeit of the most indecipherable & ghostly manner. A fine end to an absorbing listen.

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Still anonymous, still clever enough to avoid bullshit. After my enjoyment of a previous release on Mystery Sea a while ago, Seasons (Pre-Din) comes back with a 130-copy limited edition exploiting the useful nuances deriving from a coincidence of radio ghosts, camouflaged instruments, urban landscapes and various kinds of noise. In some aspects, the CD might constitute (stereotype alert!) a soundtrack for an imminent apocalypse: listen to the cyber-seagull-like muffled squealing at the beginning of the fifth section (there’s also a phantom track whose instrumental basis is rather Pink Floyd-ish). The predominant pressure and the ominous atmosphere – facilitated by omnipresent subsonics and sinisterly morphing timbral combinations – are vaguely comparable with other realities from the same district (dark post-industrial whatchamacallit and bordering regions). Indeed, selected parts made yours truly fantasize about a Lustmord/Morthound crossbreed. However, once again the protagonist managed to separate his music from cheap commonplace, dousing the whole work with a tangible anguish that keeps it quite distant from the syrupy boredom typical of 90% of this stuff. A potential explosion of violence looms, but it never happens; tension is not released, and many sounds are just great to hear. Another good one – and “for Massimo Ricci” is even printed on the cover. Who knows if it’s a personalized promo – I think so – or an actual dedication to this barking scribbler? Go, (Pre-din), go.

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