Sion Organ - Discord In Disorder

 Released: May 6

With his first release since last year’s King Karma, UK-based Sion Orgon brings us a lurid assortment of sometime just surreal and sometimes nightmarish soundscapes. Each track sounds as though it has been clipped together from a thousand different sources small and indiscriminate pieces of sound woven together into a series of churns, gurgles, clicks, clacks, and other bits of racket. It’s all rather carefully patched together with enough seeming randomness to create extremely dynamic scenes. Along with the expected noises and atonality, there’s wide use of a number of extremely melodic elements in surprising places. In the latter half of song two, “Schism,” there’s bit of saxophone that comes in with a jazz-inflected melody that feels almost out of place until the heavily treated and manipulated nature of it comes to light. Then, it effectively raised the perceived tension, giving the track an air of jazz-influence while still leaning heavily into the horror elements already present. 

An ever present factor in almost every track is this affinity for heavy upward sweeps. There’s almost always this sense of rising tension in almost every track before the tension becomes too much and it snaps like a rubber band. This especially comes through on “Rot of the Spheres,” a track which is essentially nothing but an experience of rising tension all the way to the end. And when that tension finally snaps, we’re left in near silence except for the lone bark of a single dog for several times before complete silence. It’s a fantastic example of those moments found throughout the album, where the tension breaks into near silence and we just sit in it for a few moments before moving to the next. The expert use of fragmented field recordings really plays beautifully into this theme as well.