Anakrid is thirtysomething Chris Bickel from Columbia, with assistance from friends. He’s released numerous limited edition CD-Rs and LPs before, but this is his first above ground bona fide CD. Banishment Rituals of the Disenlightened is noise music (if that isn’t a contradiction in terms), but this is noise made up of lots of discrete elements, rather than just macho blasts of white noise. It’s thoughtful, dark and spooky – occasionally reminiscent of Thunder Perfect Mind-era Nurse With Wound (although lacking the latter’s whimsical, surrealist side).
‘The Examinatione’ [sic]opens the album with odd, mechanical frog sounds – deep bass notes hang in the air, as sepulchral drones fill the background. ‘False Dymaxion’ feels like being lost in the subterranean levels of a vast factory, where the machinery is slowly decaying. ‘The Outer Beings’ is horrible – sickly, wet, grinding machine sounds are layered over malevolent sub-bass. A heavily distorted drum-machine playing mutated hip-hop beats appears on ‘The Gutenberg Galaxy’.
This album is the stuff of nightmares – not for the faint-hearted. (Special mention should also be made of the sleeve, which is like a mini LP cover, but with the heavyweight quality of a hardback book – and on the back of the cover there is a series of twelve pictures – one to illustrate each track).
Ewan Burke
