HUMAN GREED - Black Hill: Midnight At The Blighted Star

The third work in eleven years of activity for the duo made up of Scottish writer Michael Begg and visual artist Deryk Thomas, "Black Hill: Midnight at the Blighted Star" unfurls bleak, deeply unsettled sounds, poised between apocalyptic grandeur and a nocturnal, arcane splendour.

From the sinister ouverture of "Invocation" to the gloomy death-prophecies of "The Gracese Departing", Human Greed proves to have delved deep into the recesses of despair, edging toward an idea of dark-ambient that, for all its dark austerity, never stops hinting at scenarios of chilling ambiguity. As if Judgment Day were just around the corner, as if the exterminating angels had no more time to waste...

The "black hill", then, is a non-place from which to contemplate, with quiet sorrow, the disintegration of a civilisation already forever condemned to bear the weight of Time. The liquid, undulating textures of "In Absentia" thus paint metaphysical scenarios in which emotions become pure dreamlike images, turning into poignant neoclassical walls in the funereal march of "Gloaming".

This, then, is the eternal breath of a cosmos consumed by its own elusiveness ("Silver Coin"), even if, all things considered, it is a cosmos more "unconscious" than real, so much so that the raison d'être of these sounds left to their own devices can be traced to those shadowy zones where memory brushes against the enchantment-mystery of disintegration and its endless, obsessive return ("Internal Moment", "Chaplins of Ms. Selfridge").

What stands out, instead, about "Dalkeith Night" (featuring a cameo from David Tibet) is the subliminal way it manages to decode and beam back toward the stars the morbid psychic investigations of Throbbing Gristle. It does, true, within the brief span of a few minutes, turn into a mournful piano romance, but the message carries nothing melancholic about it, rather an atrocious fatalistic aftertaste.

If any ray of light does shine through on “Freeview”, it's perhaps only to further heighten the sense of disorientation that, from start to finish, remains the true essence of an imperfect record – one that nonetheless has the merit of transporting us into a realm where distances, evoked by vaporized chimes or chiaroscuro echoes, become a universal symbol of shared memory.

A “nocturnal” record, then, because it's in the silence of night that memories resurface, demanding their own space. Memory, here, as a borderland, a stage on which ghosts of voices and fleeting shadows move. Or as an allegory of an endless journey into one's own soul, in search of a source, of a Beginning.

In its horrifying grandeur, then, “Portrait Of God With Broken Toys” can only morph into a cathedral of sheer terror where the Tangerine Dream of “Zeit” measure the proportions of the Divine alongside Black Tape For A Blue Girl.

Only in that direction, after all, is it possible to trace the marks of the “deepest purity”.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google

03/04/2009