The driving force behind Industrial Black Metal act Psyclon Nine, Nero Bellum has just released his second album ‘The Voice Of Your Blood Cries To Me From The Soil’. As with ‘NFRN°’, its is an improvised exploration of modular synthesis with no overdubs or computers used in the creative process.
You can hear the song ‘Gnarseecyst’ on the MetalTalk Soundcloud Tracks of the Week playlist.
Bellum tells us: “We live in a time in which electronic music has become foolproof and ‘perfect’, with a level of mathematical and computational precision never seen before.
“To my ears this perfection has become stagnant to the point of sterility.
“With most music being entirely composed within a virtual environment, I decided to embark on a journey to find physical instruments that would resonate with my desire to create an antithesis to the current state of electronic music.
My goal was to find songs through experimentation while capturing every click and pop in the process. Every imperfection that would otherwise be edited out and discarded would be celebrated and pushed forward to the centre of my canvas.
“My journey guided me into the world of modular synthesis, with the concept of an instrument that could be customised and reconfigured to my liking being very appealing.
“While many ‘fixed-format’ synthesizers offer presets that can promote repetition, modular synthesizers force the user to build an instrument from the ground up. Following in the footsteps of West Coast pioneers such as Morton Subotnick and Suzanne Ciani, I became enamoured with the Buchla format and philosophy.
“Using controlled uncertainty to invoke evolution and exploring harmonic relationships as they apply to modulation to cultivate new timbres and allowing the instrument to have a vote in an otherwise undemocratic symbiosis.”
Tracklist
1 WILT
2 CRIMSON MILK
3 GNARSEECYST
4 A DISHEARTENING EXPRESSION OF CHEMISTRY
5 SEVEN AND TWO
6 FROM STONE INTO CHAPEL
7 ECHO LOCATION
8 WHAT IS IN MY BLOOD
9 BEYOND RECOGNITION
10 CHRYSANTHEMUM
All tracks improvised by Nero Bellum and performed live with no overdubs utilising modular synthesizers from Endorphins, Make Noise, Erica Synths, Folktek, Retro Mechanical Labs, Mystic Circuits and Laurentide Synthworks.
