Pete Namlook New Organic Life

Very strange twittering effect over what sounds like a stuttering flame give this album to an atmospheric start. Its a very impressive collage of sounds but its hard to find references as to what they actually sound like or even the images they conjure up in the mind. Its extremely fascinating stuff though. I would have thought for best effect you should listen to it in the dark. The next track starts in similar fashion but this time the sounds are more windy / breathy. They are also vast as though whatever they were representing you wouldn't want to get in the way of. Wave after wave of these sounds issue from the speakers.

They couldn't really be called pads, rather great walls of dense impenetrable noise. After each wave things subside to a relative calm but you wait for the next onslaught. The thing is though that its all rather fascinating as each wave is different from the last, sometimes subtly different but at other times radically. It's a bit like sleeping with a very busy road to one side of you, the sea to the other and a hurricane blowing over the top! The third track sounds like being on an electric train, speeding up then slowing down. Occasionally we seem to go through a tunnel or get a short circuit but basically it sounds like twenty minutes on an electric train. The next track is extremely radical and loud! Then we have a number which sounds like you are on the platform of an underground station with juggernauts and the odd rather large animal hurtling past at break neck speed. In the following number the large animal is tied to a rocket and fired into space from where it farts a bit then comes plummeting back to Earth. Only to be sent back up again and we repeat the pattern for three minutes. Unfortunately I think it burns up on track seven.

The title track sounds like my old central heating boiler just before it ceased to exist, venting boiling water into the outside world, only with this boiler I think that some other poor creature was caught up in its death throws. As for the final track, its not too dissimilar to what has gone before but probably not as abrasive. I haven't bothered using track titles with this review because they are even more meaningless here than is usual for "instrumental" albums. Sure its all noise but extremely fascinating noise. I was occasionally reminded of Conrad Schnitzler's 'Constellations' CD. That was a CD which I never fully understood but kept going back to not because I enjoyed it but more out of intrigue. This album is for those people who like rhythmless but certainly not relaxing atmospheric noise.