Vampire Rodents

The Vampire Rodents are the musical project of Canadian anthropologist Daniel Vahnke, who relocated to Arizona in the late Eighties. Joined mainly by fellow collaborator Victor Wulf (also active under the moniker Dilate) and cellist Andrea Akastia, he crafted a wholly original vision straddling the border between industrial and contemporary music. Along these lines, the third album “Lullaby Land” is an imposing, definitive masterpiece, capable of exalting the art of counterpoint within artificial, dissonant orchestrations.

A self-taught disciple of the 20th century, Vahnke shaped chaotic sound patterns through collage techniques reminiscent of the Residents or Foetus, dismembering the material into electronic samples that mirror the structure of the tracks. The operation succeeds in importing into a “rock” context the microtonal studies of great contemporary masters, from Conlon Nancarrow to Todd Dockstader, by way of the big bands of the Thirties and Forties and the cartoon soundtracks of Carl Stalling and Raymond Scott. All of this is synthesized into a creative process called Sample-Based Composition (SBC), effectively bypassing a traditional apprenticeship and making up for the lack of performing musicians. Vampire Rodents meticulously scour sound sources to build up an archive of sampled files. “Lullaby Land”, in particular, elevates this method into a sound-editing process comparable to assembling a mosaic.

The opening track, “Trilobite”, adds distorted guitar riffs, funk cadences and tribal percussion to the program outlined so far: a breathless, whirling dance in which the rhythm breaks apart and restarts again and again while Dan Gatto of Babyland's aggressive vocals duel with cello phrases and jazz saxophone samples. The violent tempo changes on “Crib Death” trace unpredictable trajectories, built on crossover beats that are total in every sense. The bizarre march of “Dogchild” is punctuated by horns and percussion mimicking a parade band gone mad. The scenario depicted by these scores veers toward dissonant shores in a timbral transformation that's deliberately chaotic yet rigorously controlled.

The title track, sung by Jared Hendrickson of Chemlab, lives inside the nightmare of a spectral ballet, wrapped in electrifying noise generated by the robotic frenzy of its pace. “Scavenger” even goes so far as to sample flying insects amid an atmosphere of cybernetic terror, alongside metallic reverbs and terrifying sonic rumbles. Indeed, it's a tall order to find anyone capable of conceiving the density of sound on “Gargoyles” and “Glow Worm” with such ease, even among the most seasoned experimenters.

And the surprises aren't over yet. “Akrotiri” launches into a reckless ritual where the gothic aura drags itself into ancestral visions bolstered by organ. The raga, meanwhile, is tied to the tightrope-walking flow of “Raga Rodentia”, driven by sitar, tabla and electronic pulses within the ethnic weave of its setting. “Awaken” is a formidable staging of a brief orchestral piece that completes the discourse begun on “Premonition” during “Demon Est Deus Inversus”. “Bosch Erotique” layers voices, moans, assorted screams over pressing strings and horns, in a theoretical continuation of Ligeti's “Aventures”. The dynamism and rhythmic irregularity of the samples on “Hubba Hubba” and “Cartouche” escape any convention, making them hard to file under any currently codified subgenre. Without looking too far, the fifty-three seconds of “Tremulous” alone are enough to redefine the sampler's craft.

Following this same path, in the guitar explosions of “Grace” (in Chinese) and “Toten Faschist” it almost seems as though metal is wrestling against the contemporary-music casing it's forced to inhabit; then again, even the heavy artillery of “Catacomb” can't help but crash against its own walls. “Dervish” stirs up monstrous cyclical hammering within bacchanals, roars and seismic tremors, and “Exuviate” is a poisonous jumble in which the symphonic mix is smothered beneath blows from the electric guitar, propped up by percussion and the gripping pulsations of electronics. As for “Nosedive”, try to imagine a startling relationship between punk ethics (Dan Gatto) and the conscientiousness of an academic education; that will give you an idea of what Vahnke was after with Vampire Rodents. The closer is entrusted to “Passage” (by Wulf), a delicate ambient breath that fuses Brian Eno and Steve Roach.

Vahnke's encyclopedic genius employs decidedly unusual means of expression, building a natural bridge between techno-industrial, contemporary music and jazz.

For these reasons too, “Lullaby Land” is a literally extreme and monumental work, both for the quality of the ideas it draws on and for its sheer length (twenty-one compositions, roughly seventy-three minutes in total).

After being overlooked by audiences and record labels for many years, this work, so unique within the global musical landscape, has finally been rediscovered. Since the indefinable eclecticism of Vampire Rodents simply goes beyond the limits of categorization.

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30/11/2006