Eternal Stalker

Description

For their first official collaboration, Japanese noise pioneer Masami Akita aka Merzbow and Australian sound sculptor Lawrence English present a harrowing and surreal portrait of nocturnal industrial activity, drawn from field recordings made at a sprawling industrial complex seven hours north of English’s home in Brisbane. He describes the area as uneasy and unnerving, bathed in the unhealthy glow of smelters and refining machines, somehow alien to this world—a liminal quality strikingly captured in Andrei Tarkovsky’s purgatorial film, Stalker, to which the album’s title alludes. For Akita, initial drafts of *Eternal Stalker* were like the soundtrack to a dystopian sci-fi opera. An atmosphere of mechanical dread and necrosed future permeates each of the album’s seven potent compositions. Opener “The Long Dream” sets the stage with steady rain on sheet metal, punctuated by thunder and metallic echoes, reverberating to the rafters of a collapsing warehouse. Quickly, the storm intensifies. “A Gate Of Light” and “Magnetic Traps” both swell to furies of electrical demolition and clanking chains, roaring and relentless. “The Visit” and “Black Thicket” operate more distantly, surveying the topography of steam, rust, and liquid metal from above, their bursts of violence swallowed by thick darkness. This is noise at its most elemental and unrecognizable: uncanny, bristling, and opaque, stalking the forbidden peripheries of chaos and creation. The sickening swells of friction and fracture overwhelm the listener, forcing them into submission to the listen: such saturation of the senses can be euphoria. Proof is delivered midway through “The Golden Sphere,” when the howling chaos subtly recedes, revealing a sinister siren drone hovering in the void, like the resonance of a dead star to distant galaxies. Slowly, a wall of seething, venomous volume returns, shredding the signal until its frequencies fray and scatter into the eye of the storm. The combined effect merges obliteration and liberation, rapture and ravage; it is the sound of dissolution as well as resolution, uprooted and unmoored, ultimately released from form.