Amklon – ‘Collision Of Absolutes’ [Boring Machines, BM071] + Full Album Stream

amklon-front

We’re pleased today to share with you the full record stream for the Italian duo Amklon’s debut-album ‘Collision of Absolutes’, out in few days on Boring Machines. Onga’s BM is among the most enduring and peculiar-sounding label in Italy; it celebrates this year its tenth birthday, keeping on nurturing the “general taste for discomfort and anger, long meditations and psychedelic states” [via] we’d learnt to love and suffer at.

Going into the details: Amklon is a duo from Naples, Italy, composed of Giuseppe Mascia, electronics, and Sergio Albano at the aluminum guitar  [the latter already appeared in amazing acts such as the schizo-jazz-ish Grizzly Imploded, the doom-folk duo Drowning in Woods and the noise outcome Monte Ossa]. The record’s title comes straight out the 2011 The Exegesis of Philip K.Dick’s opening: the passage could also be considered as the main influence in conceiving the album, as it’ll be further explained in the following lines. Right below you can listen to Collision of Absolutes in its entirety; the embedded player is followed by the original Exegesis transcript and a brief track-by-track commentary. Enjoy and support!

“The beautiful and imperishable comes into existence due to the suffering of individual perishable creatures who themselves are not beautiful, and must be reshaped to form a template from which the beautiful is printed (forged, extracted, converted). This is the terrible law of the universe. This is the basic law; it is a fact. Also, it is a fact that the suffering of the individual animal is so great that it arouses an ultimate and absolute abhorrence and pity in us when we are confronted by it. This is the essence of tragedy: the collision of two absolutes. Absolute suffering leads to – is the means to – absolute beauty. Neither absolute should be subordinated to the other. But this is not how it is: the suffering is subordinated to the value of the art produced. Thus the essence of horror underlies our realization of the bedrock nature of the universe” [PKD, 1980; read the whole text here]


Gear: Moog synth, analog drum machines, piezo, EGC custom,
500 aluminium guitar Irregular pieces of irons, E-Bow;

Amplifiers: Traynor ygl III Combo (1978) Simms-Watts (1971);
Mastering by Calix Mastering, Berlin

Collision of Absolutes comes with a video teaser you can see right here below, done by WLKTHFSH [http://www.welikethefish.com/]; the mezmerizing artwork has been done by Andrea Bolognino, an artist from Naples, Italy [http://andreabolo91.wixsite.com/andreabolognino].

 

As you’ve been able to hear by yourself, and as reported on Boring Machines’ press release as well, the work is at the “point of meeting of so many seemingly irreconcilable worlds: an architecture of dark synthetic sounds, avant-gard noises floating on atmospheric textures and a set of confessional voices”. Collision of Absolutes is at the intersection of several styles and influences, which bring the listener at the remote corners of several disjoint hyper-dimensional spaces, yet sharing one very point – that is, this outstanding 25-minutes-long record. In the attempt to list all them styles and influences out, one could possibly end up naming experimental music, fluctuating psychedelia, at times creepy ritual / ceremonial industrial, obscure drone, and aseptic dub-techno (!). Serious business indeed.

The record’s Side A is occupied by three different tracks: Transfer, the opening act, conveies the idea of moving, migrating entities using echoing vocals and alien whistling, something like a weird 60s sci-fi TV show theme; Escape follow the lead and enters dangerous territories, working the distant choirs as the sign of a foreing presence worth escaping from; then, the tensed-up GNZ-11 track, presenting horns, noise crescendos and ghastly beats, finally unveils the battle that it’s consuming at the farthest spot of the Solar Sistem against a heavy-breathing metallic creature, amazingly summoned by the music.

amklon-duo

The second side hosts two separated pieces. The first is Rings, marked by an incessant ticking beat and whispered mantras: the starring character is lost and wanders by the Saturn’s ring, his fate uncertain. The second and final one is called Moon Omega; the track is kind of a strange filtered version of movie-like spoken passages such as Gen P-Orridge’s one in Decoder, and stands as one of the most evocative moments in the record.

You can already buy Collision of Absolutes at the BM bandcamp portal [digital album releases November 18th, 2016; items ship out about November the 21th]. Please make sure you have in your record collection a fine piece of music that could summon at will the feelings and stimuli of an actual journey into the depths of boundless space (whether is it inner- or outer-), and let it be this one. “A sound can recall a sensation. Does that happen in space too? Have you been there already?


amklon-back

 


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PAYNOMINDTOUS is a non-profit organization registered in December 2018, operating since late 2015 as a webzine and media website. In early 2017, we started our own event series in Turin, IT focused on arts, experimental, and dancefloor-oriented music. We reject every clumsy invocation to “the Future” meant as the signifier for capitalistic “progress” and “innovation”, fully embracing the Present instead; we renounce any reckless and ultimately arbitrary division between “high” and “low”, respectable and not respectable, “mind” and “body”; we support and invite musicians, artists, and performers having diverse backgrounds and expressing themselves via variegated artistic practices.