Review: SCOTT MILLER / LEE CAMFIELD / MERZBOW – ' No Closure'

SCOTT MILLER / LEE CAMFIELD / MERZBOW 
'No Closure' 
COLD SPRING RECORDS 

The bed of the arrangements were recorded in abasement in San Francisco, and indeed the vibe does evoke a subterranean vibe nearly to the point where one can smell the musty walls. 'No Closure consists of two twenty-two minute tracks, but each is clearly divided into distinct sections that don't so much bleed into each other as shift direction several times.

The rhythm section of the fist section of 'I' evokes a mental image of hoboes jamming in a rusting boxcar in an abandoned siding as they await the one sent of for the sterno and gasoline. The repeating riffs sit below Masami Akita's (Merzbow) sonic manipulations juxtaposing the two ends of the collaboration instead of having them coalesce. The sound feels like it was captured live by someone adept field recording. The next section is a launch into a melancholy tremolo picked black metal melody as the electronics kiss the boiling psychedelic sky. This must mean the sterno has arrived and in the siding brains set to tweaking and the gas huffing can commence. Off we go into an organ drone over which the electronic noise grows increasingly frenetic until it trails off at the end.

Funeral doom riffs kick off 'II' with layers of what may be heavily distorted voices low in the mix or we may have a case of electronic voice phenomena haunting the track. This track has more of a metal flavour than the first, but probably only to those more familiar with blackened ambient noise terrorists like Abruptum or Swiss funeral doom precursors Mordor. Here the portentous filthy drums, electronic howling and melodic chanting sit together in quite a complementary way. The end section is like a banishing ritual to cleanse the headspace of the listener of the unclean entities the preceding sonic ritual called forth. Only too fitting for such a shamanic creation.

Posted in: Lee Camfield,MERZBOW,music,No Closure,Scott Miller