No Xivic + Gelsomina - Furnace [Some Place Else - 2007]Furnace is collaboration between two finish sound artists; No Xivic who’s know for his dark electro-acoustic soundscapes and Gelsomina who’s an prolific and inventive noise artist. Furnace offers up one long collaborative track and one each solo track- as a whole the album shows some surprising moments both structurally and sonically. It all starts with the 25 minute title track that brings together these two sound artist into the same sonic space. Begining in a surprising rocking, upbeat & memorable manner with a progy, kraut rock type churning atmospheric groove built around guitar, synth and drum work. It starts off fairly feedback and echo bound, but as it progresses it becomes more corrupted and noise bound, searing pulses and feedback shrieks pushing into ones mind, but no matter how wild and damage it becomes there are still (at times) just definable rocking elements. Track two entitled Everlasting fire is the Gelsomina solo effort which again starts off relatively subdued and atmospheric- built around slow/ distorted kettle drum march and subtle gitar hits, samples of coral music and a sea of foreign voices. At around the minute and half mark cooking static matter fades slowly in over the original sound collage, before shooting ear carnal burn and boring currents of noise into your skull. Though there are still harmonic coral sounds just at the edge of the sound trying to be heard with ranted overloaded clouds of screams and voices. As the track exits it returns to the ominous distorted kettle drum march of the start once more. Lastly we have Greater Suffering which is the No Xivic track, It starts off the most subdued of the lot with Manipulated and atmospheric wind tones. Before dropping into expansive synth drone that feels like a way slow down John carpenter track. With all manner of eerier & creepy percussive elements, voices and manipulated samples. A purring noise wall is built up like the slow roar of a coming tidelwave getting closer and closer- but it never full reaches you, instead exiting into harmonic/ spacey synth drones and rolls of sound. A rewarding collaboration between these two talented sound artists that has a lot more to offer than all out noise attack- Be interesting to see if they collaborate once more in the future again. Roger Batty
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