Séraphitüs-Séraphîta - GONELAND

 

Released: September 24

On their latest release,  Séraphitüs-Séraphîta brings us a pulsing mess of amorphous clusters of noises that has a sporadic quality to all of it. It’s a weird and difficult assortment of found sounds that are all stitched together through granular synthesis and creative arrangements to create soundscapes that go from near silence to bursts of noise that crackle, screech, and rattle in an otherwise empty vacuum. All of this happens over the course of ten tracks that vary wildly in their source material, with some being just odd field recordings that clump together and other having an aggressive and ear penetrating quality. 

It’s all rather noisy, of course. But as mentioned earlier, it happens in these weird bursts. The album opens with “Tedium” establishing this motif as we get what sounds like distorted ambient noise (like people talking and cars passing slowly on the street) that is punctuated by these periods of silence in between two to four seconds. It gives it a deliberately unhinged feeling. Like we are taking the most mundane and basic occurrences of life, separating its elements, exaggerating it to absurdity, and then placing this exaggerated version in a weird vacuum otherwise devoid of life. 

There are some exceptions though. “GONELAND,” the track that shares the name of the album comes across as more or less a near solid wall of sounds. It is thick and dense, layered in a way that is the audible equivalent of slipping into black tar. But even with this density, it is still possible to pick out some of the elements, despite there being little to no silence to allow for reflection. But this dark and void-like aesthetic carries on through the album’s runtime, even in the void becomes seemingly more impenetrable at times.