At first there is nothing. But then subtly the sound builds, this amorphous drone that you can’t help but compare to an arctic wind. Within it elements come to the fore as the sound increases in volume, gradually bringing itself into earshot and revealing more of its character. As it comes closer the immensity of it becomes clear. It’s dark and capable of violence. It’s a roaring gale with a highly articulated bottom end rumble and suddenly it’s all around the listener, feeling the brunt of mother nature. It represents what’s so interesting about Spanish composer Francisco Lopez’s work. Whilst the field recordings are more than likely processed it doesn’t remove the soul of the sounds. You feel the violence, the organic nature, even as it ascends into white noise and abruptly cuts you understand innately that it’s something you can’t control.
Amarok is the kind of soundscape that would be at home in the sound design of French experimental filmmaker Phillipe Grandrieux’s (La Ve Nouvelle), a man who delights in dark ambient noise. Amarok is a single 64 minute piece and it’s designed to unsettle. The title comes from a giant wolf in inuit mythology and there’s a creeping intensity to the compositions he uses. It’s about building into an intensity of sound then allowing it to dissipate. Yet even within the comedown there’s no beauty. It’s still bleak, stark and dangerous. It’s also not afraid to dip down to near silence and then silence, before on some strange unseen, unheard cue it springs back into life. It could almost be considered as a series of suites, yet each one feels more chilling than the last. It’s hard to think of any sound art that’s felt this evil before, this violent, this carnal. The final third is out to tear your face off, searing noise that feels as transcendent as it does unemotional and powerful. It’s an experiential album where it matters little what ingredients Lopez uses (you can’t really tell anyway), or even how he puts them together, rather it’s about how it hits you and then what it does on your insides.
Bob Baker Fish
