Hard to believe that Marc Behrens once made abstract, reductionist techno (under his Feedback Bleep and Eyephone guises), as his recorded output since those early 90s operations are literal three-sixties, manifesting themselves instead via installation, field recordings and sound art work. He seemed to shed his former skin completely, turning his back on all things rhythmic - and harmonic or melodic, for that matter - for "serious" artistic endeavors of more site-specific, concretized and politicized natures. Paulo Raposo founded the Portuguese experimental imprint Sirr, and has built up just as provocative a career muddying the waters between audio, visual, space, and architecture by highlighting the situationist malleabilities of sound.
On Hades, both Raposo and Behrens integrate natural sounds and "synthetic" occurrences so seamlessly that the environment created is rendered totally physical, a subliminal actualization of minutely coarse, occasional texture. What goes in between the sounds is every bit as important as what our ears duly render - grey area becomes a third dimension in the stereo field, the mind effectively filling in the blanks during each "epic" bit of sonic grandeur, thanks to the duo's cinematic acumen. Using sonic flotsam coaxed off of ferry boats and at the quays of Cais do Sodré, Trafaria, and Cacilhas, Portugal, despite the inherent proclamation of the album title, Behrens and Raposo want to offer glimpses and sensations rather than broad portraits of whatever seventh circles they've witnessed visually. The opening "Gate" is about as clangorous as the recording gets, as a river's tidal rush, scraping ship's hulls against scabrous pilings and the rusting shells of buoys, explodes into an index of metals and whitewash, nature's own ambience subverted into a twisted soundscape. On "Crossing Into," random squeaks weep between taut pulses, metal fibers are scored so their resonances seem to decay indefinitely; timbre is altered in an engrossing enough fashion that each steel ping, knock and shiver achieves an epic, otherworldly heft.
Though broken up into five distinct points of reference, Hades' long day's journey into night has been constructed to flow effortlessly along its Stygian parameters, Behrens' and Raposo navigating the compass of the soundscape with a bracing intensity of purpose. Eclipsing contextual margins that reaches far beyond mere installation wallpaper, Hades supple imagery informs a powerful work that ballasts its exotic origins.
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