Wrnlrd - Oneiromantical War
May 15 2008 at 05:42:48 AM
Imagine a barren and unfamiliar structure. There are several floors, many rooms. You’ve taken an elevator to the top floor to deliver a package. The door opens. You walk down a hall and enter a room, which feeds into another and then another. Doors are opened and closed.
It’s a simple and automatic activity. You’ve been doing this all of your life.
Your eyes grow accustomed to the sharp, surgical lighting.
The power fails. No light. No thing.
You are left to inch your way along walls and over thresholds into rooms of space blackened and unknown. Door handles and light fixtures and windows are textural enigmas. Their purpose is imbued with a meaning deeper than you’ve ever realized.
Structure is erased. It’s redrawn slowly as paths are crossed, connected, illuminated to the mind as a place emptying into additional space. You think your progress is acceptable.
Not too bad for the situation at hand.
Then you have a thought: What if the lights never come back on?
Will you be able to find your way out?
One-man Black Metal outfit, Wrnlrd, articulates a disturbingly similar instance with his latest recording,
Oneiromantical War. At once an aggressive and unforgiving attack on Black Metal’s genre constraints and a bizarre exercise in seemingly automatic composition which benefits from relentlessly uncontrolled ambience,
Oneiromantical War deliberately razes its internal structure all while growing potent and haunting interludes out of the chaos of disregard.
Sounds are plentiful, myriad. Guitar as steel mill saw. Eddying, throbbing gain. One-handed war drumming. Bleated beats erupt upon dead stretched skins. Cymbals choked, smoldering in a plastic sustain. Voice slips, slits through forbidding, distorted ambience. Unintelligible lyrics are rolled about a bloated, deadened tongue. So many stones piled atop a freshly filled grave. Whispers. Acoustic noodles detuned and rickety. Smears of sounds unknown.
It’s a perplexing listen. Analogues are few. Jandek? Velvet Cacoon? The Eraserhead OST? All and none of these. But creating something from the foundation of such a staid and hopeless genre as Black Metal that breathes uniquely, and moves independently of any semblance of “guiding criteria” is quite an accomplishment. Recommended.
[Stewart Voegtlin]
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