[Reviewed by: Iaha Crax]
For a while now there’s been an obvious tendency towards a sub-scene, which borrows technical ingredients from ambient and drone and assembles them with the weapons of noise and dark atmospheres. Whether this death-drone manifestation has originated from the earlier experiments of Sunn O))), extreme doom (like let’s say Bunkur) or the hyper-sensitive suicidal power electronics of Navicon Torture Technologies, it is surely just a matter of aesthetic criticism, for those that see art in this kind of music. Most likely, such projects arise from a different background than the industrial noise culture, a psychological frame akin to black and death Metal expression.
Isolator features members from Father Befoulded and Encoffination, American death-doom monsters, singing their despair and outrage in the old-school metallic register. Malignant Records issued the present record as a following to their recent affinity for T.O.M.B., Theologian, Adelaring, Gnawed…
With their first song “Cast into Blood”, Isolator casts the first stone upon those who preached they have never exalted anti-human feelings. A primitive guitar droning receives a smooth caress by sparkling electronics. It is like the soul tries to soar to the skies, but is being strangled by material forces that extinguish any trace of life.
In a way, Isolator’s layers of dull and monotonous, almost imperceptible structured noises can be paralleled to harsh noise walls, only that instead of the disruptive repetition of sound waves they reiterate a drone wall of impotent catalepsy. “Mankind Shall Reap The Mistakes God Hath Sown” flows upon you irremediably, up to a drowning effect that leaves you senseless. The dark-ambient here is masochistic in terms of acceptance; your only desire resides in self-oblivion.
The power electronics stratum is reduced at sub-levels where the brain coagulates with even more difficulty, so that the instability of soundwave processing acquires psychotic consequences. This is what may happen upon listening to “Carrion For The Feasts Of Angels”, where heavily laden layers increase and decrease punctually, like in a metronome formula.
Drones are flooding the body in a strangely soothing way. The guitar layered noises bear close resemblances with the sludge-drone, and by now defunct ultra-slow funeral doom. On this severely entitled “Your Heaven Will Writhe Within The Chaos Of My Hell”, these alienated and enraged free-improvisations are like impotent shrieks and dejections of madness and disconsolation, uttered from a debilitated, catatonic spirit unable to elude the thick blindfold vapors of disease and smog around it.
You can’t simply extort some scanty gratification out of this disc. Isolator hasn’t yet reached a sufficient level of accuracy and coherence in the scene, but they achieve from the beginning a sense of bleakness and distance that range them among authentic purveyors of misanthropic escapist music. On their last track, “Into The Blood Of Our Kingdom”, they retreat into their comfort ambit, a malignant perimeter enclosing toxic and venomous vacillations of embodied murmurs and chants, slowly diffused inside the mental faculties of the listener, which is now left bereft of life and refractory to any hematology.
Isolator – Culture & Principal Of Anti-Human Exaltation
Black Plagve, Infect15
CD 2014
Santa Sangre 