VERROTTET by SVØND [KAMMER Records]

[pehrenhard]

VERROTTET by SVØND
https://kammerrecords.bandcamp.com/album/verrottet

I Kicks in with crushingly heavy fuzz noise and an ultra fast, racing, relentless pulse
which carries the sheer weight that's being stacked up on it.
High pitch tones and synth-like textural arpeggio swirls
paint a picture of insects or other small life in an environment that seems extremely
dead at the first glimpse. The overall sound is enriched with a subtle but effective reverb
that makes the overall environment of this piece cold, hard in touch, surgical and lifeless.
Images of organic tissue on silver steel decomposing beyond recognition while giving life to
to new organisms - moving, pulsating. It breathes and exists but isn't meant for me to see it.

II radiates heat, scorching heat. A forboding synth bass being covered by a thick layer of fuzz
noise that at times drowns out all other textures happening with it's blown out, thick sound,
rich in sonic artifacts. The lead figure on top, a literal loop of feedback I believe, breaks through
the sonic picture like red meat when the skin is scorching and sizzling away. We're in a furnace.
We were gone before we got here. The fabric that keeps the structure of this piece gets slowly
burned away until it collapses and is left as smoking, charred remains of an idea of what once
was alive and breathing and existing with emotions and reason.

III begins just like it ends - muffled, blown out feedback rewoking distant, fading memories, creating a somewhat nostalgic soundscape. I'm fading, my presence feels gone, but I'm still there.
The dusty textures keep fading in a maelstrom of reverberated, endless mechanical and inhuman sounding audio images in a never ending staircase down into the darkness. It smells moldy, the air gets humid and the atmosphere is becoming heavy. It's chaos, sound information keeps
stumbling over each other, it's alive and dynamic. The sounds get more and more present, break their way out of the reverb, look you straight in the eye. It's gonna get you, the end is gonna get you too. The piece reminds you that you were born of an idea and will leave as a memory, which, after all, is only a glorified idea. Pulsating distortion textures grow out of the chaos, they are dry and real. The sounds make me think of health - or more the lack of it: Emergency room computers, life support machines, the dread of fading physical and mental well-being. The piece ends how it began - with muffled, blown out feedback. Only now it adds a thick pulsing rhythm - it's heavy and physical, slow and immediate. It's the moment where your own mortality gets apparent and there is no way around it. It fades, the memory stays as I slowly drift away.

IV takes the idea and effect of a previously presented lead and blows it up to epic proportion. This piece is big and grandiose - a simple, two note melody lies on a bed of bass heavy fuzz noise, being rather carried and caressed than choked and drowned out. Human like voices seem to break through, but only as a texture with no semantic information attached. It feels rusty and cold, but alive. It's transcendental, I'm leaving the earthly realm and weightlessly get amalgamated with a sea of nothingness and everything. The piece carefully dismantles itself towards the end, leaving nothing but its, assumably, source sound - moving metal, machines, the remains of the world I left.

V takes the other route - a monolithic piece of sheer force. A rhythmic, throbbing synth pulse gives this piece a massive concrete basis right from the get go, modulating slightly at times, but always provides nothing but faceless brutality. This is being topped by intense layers of electronic feedback and fuzz noise, so thick it fills the room with pure pressure and unease. It's a burning puddle of black tar in a concrete cell with no windows, it stinks and eats itself into the foundation and smothers you. Just as you think you're getting used to the weight of the atmosphere V digs right into you with sharp, surgical sounds that make all the space this piece created prior implode along with you.
This might be the heaviest, most relentless piece on Verrottet. It sounds huge, but so extraordinarily intriguing with it’s thought out, precise mix.

6 is a majestic behemoth which showcases all the elements shown in this concept of a release in an extremely grand and crushing manner. Sonic tremor throws rhythmic rubble from left to right, comes close to your face before jumping right back into a sea of reverb and noise. It’s disorienting, we’re in middle of a raging storm - a scorchingly hot storm. And there it comes -
the sky opens up and through breaks an image of the planet we’re on right now. Something’s different tho - that planet we see in the sky is lifeless and brittle, it’s been dead for a long time by now. And it’s moving closer; and it’s eventually going to crush us all. What has sonic similarities to a shiphorn takes the form of the ultimate bringer of doom - massive, reverberated, heavy. A collision, a light, silence. The narrative arc this piece creates in six minutes is so visual und rich, it leaves me inspired and elevated but eerily melancholic at the same time.