Based on Very Subtle's (last name unknown) very subtle suggestion, I thought I'd write a review on The Hole, despite my complete lack of proficiency in writing reviews for music.
In this album, Cazazza Dan makes a departure from his usual zany boops and wacky melodies to create something evoking the two tenets of Boring and Repetitive, which to me makes for a pleasant surprise, as I have been repeatedly told by certain individuals that I like those two things very much. It's markedly industrial in style; the dark and moody ambience from what sounds like banging of kitchen tools together and slowed down to extremes provides a great backdrop to a harrowing and surreal experience. Some of Cazazza Dan's usual instrumentation can be heard at times, although much more subdued and subtle, merely contributing to the sea of noise but not overshadowing it.
This is correct in a sense. The beginning and end are built out of piano and violin tracks from a piece I wrote last year, in that sense it retains a material connection to my other work, but its treatment here is totally transformative, and very little recognisable instrument sounds are featured. The rest is almost entirely made from Foxbox's voice, whether from entire recordings or phrases or even single phonemes, using a wide array of manipulative techniques combining sample stretching and compression, pitch bending, filters, delays, signal amplification, distortion, noise removal. Almost all the work is created through combining these things in different configurations, though of course occasionally a simple application using a single tool did the job just fine. The background is actually street noise from outside my house, but the dry signal is completely removed and replaced with 200% wet signal reverb with a 6000ms tail and heavy diffusion, which makes the majority of the noise fluidly integrated while maintaining the individuality of its components to a degree, creating a spacious environment for the actually constructed elements of the piece to exist in.
The Hole seems to be a concept album in structure, as the story of the hole itself is told through a great reading provided by Foxbox in the second track, Monodrama. After that, the narrative becomes more implicit, as the narration is distorted to the point of no recognition, to illustrate the descent into the hole and the surreal environment that it is. The distorted voices become more prominent and sound more agitated as time goes on, and you can hear in it the madness that the hole evokes.
The combination of ambience, harsh tones, musique concrète noises and distorted voices mixed with actual narration is very reminiscent to industrial music in general, but to me it reminded me the most of Swans' Soundtracks for the Blind, an album that to my knowledge Crudblud hasn't even listened to yet; what a gay.
It should go without saying at this point that if you like industrial or dark ambient music, you will most likely enjoy this album quite a lot, as I did. It is a fine piece of production that successfully creates an atmosphere it strives for, without ever seeming too predictable or unoriginal.
The narrative elements of the piece, although the most obvious, are more means to a musical end, since it is the musical elements of speech that drive it for the bulk of its duration. I was very interested in getting inside the phonemes, drawing them out and exposing their melodic and timbral qualities, and things hidden inside them which could only be revealed through stripping them down to bare components, and to work with these components in a number of ways. This idea, which is the conceptual basis for tracks 3-6, was mainly inspired by Robert Ashley's
Automatic Writing, which takes the editing of sentences down to basic phonemes, or rather the removal of meaning through this editing, as its focal point. In this way, I suppose, both
The Hole and
Automatic Writing comment on what is musical and what is extramusical. Words are extramusical, but their phonetic components as spoken are musical, the result of sentence deconstruction as practised in both pieces is perhaps a blurring of the line between the two.
Also thanks for listening, I'm glad you liked it! And yes, I will stop being gay and listen to
Soundtracks for the Blind soon.