JUTE GYTE - Perdurance

In recent years, Adam Kalmbach has continued to pull the strings behind the scenes of the Jute Gyte project, churning out a remarkable number of records, the latest of which, "Perdurance", is very likely his most significant album to date. The sonic coordinates (a hysterical black-metal that devours influences from both industrial music and cybergrind, passing through the most abstract electronics and contemporary classical) are the same as on the previous "Ship Of Theseus", but "Perdurance" leans on even more complex scores, where the use of polyrhythms and microtones (that is, musical intervals smaller than a semitone) proves even more compelling.

The decision to use a guitar with a microtonal fretboard dates back to the 2013 release of "Discontinuities", and, in the end, after an initial, more traditionalist phase, that choice turned out to be decisive in the sonic economy of the Missouri musician.

The incipit of "At The Limit Of Fertile Land" (11:30) is blistering: a hail of blast-beats preluding an android dancefloor. The battlefield is crossed by babel-like shudders and inhuman abrasions, while bursts of brawny groove, flourishes of celestial splendor and flashes of gasoline fire spill over. Towards the end, a stream of melancholy wonder rises, with the melody winding down to suggest the mind's torpor in the face of the hypnosis of everyday life ("These are the arrows that kill sleep in the night at all hours/ The flood is gone, the ebb has come").

The slimy riff of "The Harvesting Of Ruins" (10:52), while evoking dark folk rites of Eastern Europe, is girded by sarabandes of the roughest EBM. A brief interlude of filtered cowbells resets the structure before martial thuds steer the music along increasingly impervious paths, where minimalist blocks collide with superhuman stratifications.

The bombardment that opens "Like The Woodcutter Sawing His Hands" (9:24; which draws inspiration from the opening theme of Brahms's first piano quartet!) first plunges into a short-circuit of zombie vocalizations and noise swamps, then proceeds in oddly polyrhythmic fashion, before freezing into a limbo of echoes, dilations and electrostatic discharges. Relatively more measured, the path of "Palimpsest" (8:19) unwinds between doom riff-fests and informal panels generated by hybrids of mutant IDM and digital-age musique concrète, the same elements that also emerge in the folds of "Consciousness" (10:02), whose opening section is, in Kalmbach's own words, "a sequence of nine chords that expand microtonally, moving from the darkest and most compact to the brightest and broadest", in a paroxysmal circular ascent that seems about to reach breaking point at any moment. In a continuous exchange between ferocity and rationality, the music grows ever more merciless and steep, finally converging into the "industrial" machinery of "I Am In Athens And Pericles Is Young" (12:32; the album's masterpiece), a terminal odyssey that synthesizes more or less all the stylistic perspectives of the work, almost rising to a Wagnerian dimension as it marks out madness through geometric edits, mournful arpeggiated countermelodies and telluric stoner riffs reminiscent of the geometric terror of Today Is The Day's "Never Answer The Phone". Towards the close, an apotheosis of polyrhythms and polyphonies. The coda, a wavering of pendulous harmonies.

Although its foundations rest on the most experimental tradition of black metal, "Perdurance" ends up shifting into indecipherable sonic territory. Thus, while the various musical sections are arranged to build into symphonic crescendos, the electronic interludes act as variations that both defuse and, at the same time, relaunch from different perspectives the explosive fury of scores that conceal the seeds of a new surrealism for replicants.

White stone in the white sunlight

The labyrinth of remembrance

The empty stony maze

Killing memories with a sharpened awl

Killing the moments to come

Beyond good and evil

Beyond freedom and dignity

No standard, no security, no simple acquiescence

I am in Athens and Pericles is young

Ride the wave of great music

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02/11/2016