Aemae is 25 year-old Brandon Nickell, resident of Oakland CA, and Maw is his second album. (His previous album The Helical Word was reviewed in issue #13.) Maw contains five tracks demonstrating Nickell’s flair for instinctive electronic composition, carefully sculpted noise and extreme electro-acoustic practices.
Opening track ‘PDE’ begins with a few speaker-shredding blasts of noise, piercing high-end tones and ominous rumbles. It gradually moves into more aqueous terrain, with underwatery sounds reminiscent of Beatriz Ferreyra’s ‘Demeures Aquatiques’. Loud industrial whistles and steam sounds in ‘Confound Me’ are almost train-like – albeit a train bound for infernal regions (and I don’t mean Broadmeadows.) ‘Spectral Psychosis’ sounds like some unhappy monks caught in a cell with some large buzzing insects. ‘Bad Entity’ lets the listener relax a little with a sparser, suitably wraith-like ambience. ‘The Bell Contour Memory’ rounds things off with some ghostly musique concrete sounds – imagine if The Blair Witch Project had been scored by Henri Pousseur.
Although this is nominally Noise music, this is noise of a calmer, more nuanced nature than some of the louder practitioners of the genre.
You can listen to MP3 samples of this album at http://www.isounderscore.com/
Ewan Burke
