About This Item
On their first official collaboration, Japanese noise pioneer Masami Akita aka Merzbow and Australian sound sculptor Lawrence English present a harrowing, surrealist portrait of nocturnal industrial activity, spawned by field recordings made in a sprawling factory complex seven hours north of English's home in Brisbane. He characterizes the area as Inchuneasy and unsettling,Inch awash in the sickly glow of smelters and refinement machinery, somehow not of this world - a liminal quality vividly captured in Andrei Tarkovsky's sprawling purgatorial opus, Stalker, to which the title alludes. Akita, too, described early drafts of Eternal Stalker as feeling Inchlike the soundtrack to a dystopian science fiction opera.Inch A mood of mechanical dread and ruined futures permeates each of the album's seven potent compositions.Opener InchThe Long DreamInch sets the stage with steady rain on sheet metal, punctured by thunder and metallic echoes, reverberating to the rafters in a collapsing warehouse. Quickly the tempest rises. InchA Gate Of LightInch and InchMagnetic TrapsInch both convulse in churning furies of electric demolition and rattling chains, roaring and relentless. InchThe VisitInch and InchBlack ThicketInch operate more at a distance, surveying the topography of steam, rust, and liquid metal from above, their flickers of violence like gunfire swallowed by blankets of darkness. This is noise at it's most elemental and unknowable brooding, bristling, and opaque, stalking forbidden peripheries of chaos and creation.Discussing Akita's music, English refers to it's Inchintense substrata that is purely psychedelic; it consumes and confounds.Inch The seasick swells of friction and fracture subsume the listener, forcing an auditory surrender Inchthis saturation of the senses can be a euphoria.Inch Proof comes halfway through InchThe Golden Sphere,Inch when the howling mayhe
