The Seventh Seal is a recent CDR release from those prolific NY boys Arklight for Abandon Ship Records. It’s full of grainy overlapping textures and loops that create their own desolate narrative. Guiding your head with guitar and rhythmic fragments corrupted in the cancer of error, almost as if the shadows of humanity were grafted to the steel like super-eight projections – flickering and jumping in imperfection.
Antonius Block sounds like chain mail dancing on skin, which is kinda appropriate given the song’s title – Morse crabs clawing at sheet-metal groins. Rickety insect legs across a tin-foiled beach in constricted almost awkward pulses. Electro ‘tiddly winks’ with guitar pick-ups, bouncy haemoglobin congealing in a zrrring whirl of solder.
Scratching The Water is a preset downtrodden tempo over wayward industry; abstractive voices pissing out retinal debris, groping towards song or Arabic tower top refrain. Reversed itchy illumination through texture as empty coat hangers wilt in window boxes.
Skin Cancer Blues, creeps over you like an infection wrapped up in an apparition of squeezebox with a lite cymbal kiss n graze. A loose natured attrition that discolours the skin in whispered incantation and vibrating strings.
Ballad of Narayama – a lovely drone warble with folksy loop topping – battery-shot keyboard wheezing over broken glass aspirations – flashes or fluttering wings of beats – chopped body shop eddies of double time making everything edgy. An alphabet soup of cybernetic parts clanging against the spoon.
A Green Blimp... a boxing match in a grain silo. A hobo moans away in the corner shuffling playing cards of stiff leather, or cranking the mechanism of a child’s counting toy caught in a state of constant de-ja-vu. Strange nodding heads inflate, bloated smiles bobbing to the greasy rhythm, oil pours from their mumbling orifices, as fist or foot crashes them back down.
What you Might Destroy... swirling feedback elegy eaten in a desert mirage of locusts or twirling lotus petals sucked into the flex of a mirror – opening apertures, churning rays forced down a narrow junction - The ghosts of apparatus circling in discord as plucked strings mix with the shadows.
What this all has to do with the Bergmann film is anybodies guess, but it has to be said, watching it with this as a soundtrack certainly brings new light to cinematic genius...
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