[Reviewed by: Iaha Crax]
The composer of these 4 musical sketches adopts the aesthetics of power electronics; nonetheless he stays away from the decadent approach and raw execution specific to Nordic European projects. This time, after recordings released through Hospital Productions, Nil by Mouth or Urashima, the album is released through Malignant Records and the mastering is done by John Stillings of Steel Hook Audio.
The first scene, ‘The Womb As Vestibule’, is fixated inside an oppressive surrounding space, a prison-room of yet a familiar scent. The author’s brush is very rigidly used with pumping low-bass movements, severely cut through by slashes of hissing noises. Soundwise the atmosphere is lively and hostile, breathing a hardly bearable sense of spatialisation, because noises are being dispersed in every corner of the listener’s mind, seemingly random. I cannot hide how roughly my memories are hardened up by a certain pattern previously heard on Brighter Death Now, that here is more polite and architecturally expressed.
The Milwaukee artist expends much energy building the framework for his songs. Both desolately majestic and awkward up to the point of being terrific, his compositions refuse the simplicity of a compelling rhythm or the genius of incidental music. He’s taking the listener on a trip that is abusively rewarding for one attuned to sick power electronics, and just as engaging for other dark industrial genre lovers (necrophiliacs, to be more explicit). On ‘Fingering Dead Ashes As Evidence’, the skeleton of the song borrows from a multitude of industrial subgenres, the whole piece being submitted to a genuine artistic treatment, a refinement that would please a sophisticated and form-obsessed audience alike. On the other hand, he seeks to make the listener tremble, turning his melody into a gothic tale, with an abundance of intrigues shifting along with the moods of the listener.
A dark ambient track inspired or aroused by sexual deviances may seem foolish and pathetic, yet the third piece is proof that an artistic interpretation can make any subject worthwhile, regardless of its musical register. ‘Environments For Paranoid Necrotic Masturbation’ can be coined as paraphilic ambient, a surrogate of self-pleasure inducing a pronounced level of fetishistic interest due to the sick stimulus it provides.
Climax Denial is one monstrous fruit from the industrial underground tree. One to be reaped only if you have previously tasted its core. It acts as a receptor for people who have already gone deep down and tasted the slime of their sensitive soul.
A final image pleases our eyes and nostrils on ‘Morning Following Dried Blood’. It’s an act of observation, painted in noise splashes smearing an elliptic, unfolding tune, a fetishistic gaze upon an aftermath, a coincidental moment that still bears the marks of a past deed and urges a future act of cruelty.
‘Dehumanizing Environments’ describes a radical vision of spaces rendered unhuman by the very morbidity of human presence. The musical tableaux composed by Climax Denial are a companion through realms we reject and hide from ourselves, while they are the ones we cherish most at our darkest hour.
Climax Denial – Dehumanizing Environments
Malignant Records, TumorCD88
CD/Digital 2015
Santa Sangre 