WHITE SUNS - Psychic Drift

A solid power trio based in Brooklyn, White Suns kicked off their career with a noise-hardcore sound that was already furious but also strangely singular, shot through with electronic jolts and screamed with sheer damnation, across "Waking In The Reservoir" (2011), "Sinews" (2012) and especially "Totem" (2014). With "Psychic Drift" they make a far more ambitious move. Although the lineup is still the same trio, Dana Matthiessen and Rick Visser now find themselves at the mercy of Kevin Barry's visions, as he becomes the group's main composer, or at least the driving force behind its artistic direction. The project Barry embarks on is thus one of filtering genres and subgenres of alternative rock in order to extract an essence closer to sound sculpture or avant-garde collage, albeit one brimming more than ever with the excesses of industrial music and noise for its own sake.

Fourteen minutes of "Korea" thus amount to a credible sketch of a symphonic poem for the twenty-first century, organized in a loose way into sections that are born, die and are reborn, always at a maniacal level of black noise. At first it comes across as a thoroughly deranged version of Wyatt's "Rock Bottom" (drones of pure polyphonic sound), but real and sampled voices soon pile on top of each other, along with screeches of every kind and alien volumetrics. The psychic dissociation referenced in the album's title is purely a pretext: what the trio is really after is turning mental illness into an expressionist construct taken to the nth degree, worthy of Arnold Schönberg. "A Year Wihout Summer" (ten minutes) opens quietly, exceedingly funereal, with the tolling of death knells, jammed tape loops that sound like ambient recordings made in catacombs, and a distorted gurgle. Electronic gunshots gradually turn into machine-gun fire, cannon blasts, nuclear gusts that pulverize and sweep everything away: it all implodes into an anonymous, impassive metallurgic uproar.

If the shortest track on the album, "Pilgrim", seems like nothing more than a cluster of funereal bellows, deceptively somewhere between a deafening locomotive roar "softened" by an earthquake-like vibration and an industrial hammering that tends to dissolve, "Medicine Walk" loses even the last stronghold of identity, any semblance of being a "song", and is instead more of an improvised happening of disjointed sounds running on irregular, out-of-sync cycles: extremely deep rumbles, deafening drills darting through the dark, irritating clattering, and then a whirlpool of robotic reverb and a sloshing of sludge dispersing into silence.

A radical record, the kind you only come across once every couple of decades (Faust, Royal Trux), with no concessions to the listener. A disorganic, abrasive, sinister atmosphere, shaped by a band without guitars, or at least one that transfigures and disintegrates their sound entirely, a sublime ode to formlessness, reaching heights never attained by Wolf Eyes, Sightings or Yellow Swans. The well-aimed production nearly erases the vocals altogether, bearing in mind the tradition of Slint, Gastr Del Sol and June Of '44, where voice was an ornament, a symbol of the alienation of kids, yet here demoting it even further into an ungainly interjection that spits out words, mutters, intones chants, and spouts terms at random. And the rhythm, whether thuds or jolts, metronomic ticking or jungle-like skidding, does nothing to lend the sound a sense of musical structure: if anything, it rarefies and further debases it. If you want a work capable of describing sound as sound, crisis as crisis, grab this one while you can. Underrated.

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03/01/2018