Swansither has been lurking at the fringes of the electronic scene for the last few years, slowly building a name for themselves as a harbinger of rather macabre takes on modular synthesis and its related fields. The last month or so has seen two pretty hi-profile releases – a contribution to Ian Boddy’s Tone Science series of modular experiments, and this, The Slaughtered Lamb Sessions out on Castles in Space subscription series.
Having holed up in the literal pub of the same name from American Werewolf in London, The Slaughtered Lamb Sessions provides a suitably scary backdrop for Swansither’s music, a setting that allows them to go perhaps a little weirder than they’ve gone before. Queue moody arpeggiations and burbling electronics, a wealth of naked melodies and sordid drones. It would be easy for something this indebted to classic horror to be a little too cliched, a fate thankfully avoided by both a certain minimalist aesthetic and a dearth of the sort of atonal clashes we’ve come to associate with the genre. Most of this sounds surprisingly pleasant- albeit it in a vaguely skin-crawling manner, more intent on causing fear through a wilfully stubborn progression through its simple means than throwing every ‘scary’ sound at the wall.
The rhythmic focus of tracks like ‘Keep to the Path’ forges a techno-like vibe, riffing off of the sort of analogue experiments that Stefan Goldmann put out when at his weirdest. There’s a touch of ambient too, such is the fashion – a surprisingly cuddly middle section of the album that eschews horror for sentimentality. It perhaps betrays the theme, but it makes for a more diverse album. Whilst the likes of Aftermath offer up some good old fashioned analogue drones, the title for best track is shared by both ‘warning’ and the closer, ‘dead end’. The former invokes some truly warped sensibilities, eschewing regular meter in favour of pseudo-random triggering of almost karplus-strong type plucks with no discernible structure; the latter leaning in to the slow-burning horror of its source material, but doing so with a wonderful degree of restraint that pushes things into an almost Pierre Henry electro-acoustic territory.
Lurk Reflex, offered up for volume 2 of our MEANS compilation, continues this foray into horror aesthetics: a grit-laden drum machine – so simplistic as to be little more than a glorified metronome – ticks a way in the foreground, before revealing bursts of filtered noise and a buzzing, distorted bass. The addition of some bell-like timbres and the steady strengthening of the bass cement the air of trepidation, a feeling that we are not really going anywhere – and we’re not. The track drifts in to nothingness, the atmospheric air of rattling high-end shimmers and granular effects taking hold, a morose cloud that reveal at last a melodic guitar peering, optimistically, thought the gloom.
Daniel Alexander Hignell-Tully
MEANS 