ANCIENT METHODS - Society Of The Spectacle

The project of Michael Wollenhaupt, sole owner of the Ancient Methods name since 2014 (following Conrad Protzmann's departure), returns with an ambitious concept centered on "The Society of the Spectacle" by the French philosopher and sociologist Guy Debord (who died by suicide in 1994), one of the most influential thinkers of the last century.

The essay (published in 1967) prophetically denounced the controlling power wielded by mass media within the capitalist system.

The intentions are there, but there's little substance to back them up, even compared to the project's more recent output (to say nothing of the Berlin musician's only true full-length, 2018's "The Jericho Records"). Setting aside three interludes where spoken word is smeared with experimental electronic textures, what remains is an EP made up of four tracks that only partly convince: it opens with "Image Is My Commodity", a by-the-numbers techno-industrial cut, neither remarkable nor bad, before moving into the record's centerpiece, "Burn The Frame" (a six-and-a-half-minute pounder built on an approach much closer to Nineties trance). Here, on vocals, we find an unexpected female presence: Night In Athens.

Closing the circle are the decent "Cache La Misère" and the rough-edged "The House That Ideology Built", the latter genuinely uninspired by Ancient Methods' usual standards.

“The more the spectator contemplates, the less he lives. The more he agrees to recognize himself in the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own existence and desire.” This is just one of the many illuminating lines found within Debord's work. Yet these very words seem to echo through the grooves of the album under review, weighed down at times by its literary trappings and perhaps too conceptual to turn its sonic material into something tangible. Caught between sociology and technoid sounds that don't always cohere, "Society Of The Spectacle" closes its final pages without any notable jolts.

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17/04/2026