Artist: God Body Disconnect
Title: Lost Within Loss
Type: Album
Label: Digital / Cryo Chamber
It was well over a decade ago that a good friend of mine, a fine visual artist, put me onto Cryo Chamber as a dark ambient label through their epic HP Lovecraft collaborations. I had ,over the preceding decade or so, dipped my toes in and out of the world of dark ambient which at times can make the world of dungeon synth seem simple and underpopulated… It was an easy place to slip into.
It all goes back to my teenage years really with Tangerine Dream and Vangelis and then Dead Can Dance adding moments of ambient to my playlist. I guess the big moments though were Ulver’s maesterwork ‘Perdition City’, Lustmord’s seminal and still terrifying ‘Heresy’ album (that shotgun sound gets me every time), Black Mountain Transmitter’s ‘Black Goat Of The Woods’ and Inade’s ‘Alderbaran’ that pushed me into the dark ambient world.
Bruce Moallem’s God Body Disconnect project and the album ‘Dredge Portals’ was one of those albums that left a haunted space inside me.
I dip in and out of the dark ambient world still, followed Lustmord’s varied career, but the streams of music pull you in strange directions at times but somehow oddly always loop back.
And here we are, in the dead hours once more. The world of a city caught in that space where it no longer knows if it is slowing down to sleep or slowly waking for the day. And here God Body Disconnect seem to be searching for the sense of loss that wanders in this space. The sound here though is filled with such… such warmth somehow. There is no sense of cold to the weird isolation that only cities can bring, and there is even a sense of comfort somehow. ‘Hiding In Nostalgia’ as one passage is named; perhaps a nod to the recording process here which was recorded on old 80s-90s cassette recorders and a VCR and yet the production is so beautiful, so all encompassing but not in the slightest stifling. It has a true sense of yearning. A day has passed, the night faded and you know you have seen something here, something known most of your life that is fading from the world and will never be experienced again by anyone.
It makes me think back to a time of my slife when I passed far too many nights in hotels, peering out over another cityscape where light and neon were the jewels on some tiara and the darkness hit the grime and the stains of a filthy city and windows held back the smells. Sometimes I would open those windows just to catch the sounds below; parties fading down a backstreet, kicking bottles and cans, lonely shouts, bursts of something dark and angry and tired and the cough and rattle of a car. Other times I would simply fall asleep to those sounds and the buzzing of the hotel TV.
‘They Said It Couldn’t Rain Forever’ is the moment of half waking, the slow reverie that unaided drifts into places perhaps are best not revisited during daylight. Those moments when perhaps you had a choice and, had the world been different, a different choice and a different life could have been yours. A better one maybe… but it is all dreams that drift out of focus as the fingers of your memory pass through them.
Intensity is a strange beast. The side we all think of is tense, that part. We imagine muscles clenching and anger and a power over us. But this is such an intense work, but it moves is a slow, gentle way. It simply offers you a place where you have no option but to think, to imagine and to reminisce.
And in the end, as ‘Destined To Disappear’ closes the hotel door behind me, this is an album of the sense of loss. Not of things but of people and emotions and the times that wrapped around them. Mine are, inevitably, ones of solitude. It is my soul and my life I guess. But this offers me memories of things that were different, the slow motion world of the early hours I used to spend so much time in, sitting, thinking, wishing and wondering. Echoes of the party I just left in the distance, the friends I was just in the company of. Rooms on the verge of an adventure. A time of possibilities. Possibilities that never happened? Oh, yes, of course, but gentle is the reminder that the time of those possibilities was an adventure in itself. We lived those times and where we came out of them is simply the way things are.
The city eventually wakes, the persistent rain fading, the quiet shifting into something a little more solid. It is another day. But we still remember the neon noir beauty and the sadness of those lost hours.
Just the neon noir beauty and their sadness remains.
A Masterclass.
Gizmo
Walking The Liminal Space 