“Audacious and melodious, hypnotic and attractive, this last opus of Nothing But Noise already leads my list for the most beautiful album of 2018”
1 NO wave Suite 19:31 2 745 Sekunden 12:25 3 Gott Der Götter 25:37 4 Der Himmel über ... 14:02 NBN Music (CD/DDL 71:35) (V.F.) (Dark Psybient & Berlin School)
I got to say that the name can intimidate the most adventurous ears! Nothing But Noise! This musical project gathers 2 companions from Front 242, a band of Belgian industrial music which knew its moments of glory in the course of the New Wave movement in the 80's and the 90's and which stopped its activities at the dawn of 2000's. Daniel Bressanutti and Dirk Bergen, who had left the ship shortly after the making of the first album Geography in 1982, formed NBN in 2012 with a first album which surprises the music milieu with a form of ambient music of which the origin of industrial music floats with its thousands of noisy prisms. All the opposite of the energetic music Front 242! EXISTENCE OSCILLATION (possible) FUTURE is the 3rd album of a possible trilogy begun in 2016 with eXistence Oscilla+ion. The title moreover sets the tone to the stylistic device of the music where multiple oscillating lines forge a sound panorama which allows to welcome a music of ambiences as well meditative as frisky and where the ears are constantly on the alert. NBN tells to draw its influences as far as in the textures of the ex-bass player of Can, Holger Czukay, one of the pioneers of the samplings technique, and Jean-Michel Jarre, while being very hooked on the Library Music of the BBC and of Klaus Schulze's iodized atmospheres. It's mainly these influences which extend over an album which gets more and more attractive and more and more hard-hitting in the course of its discovery.
NO wave Suite brings us straight out in the particular universe of NBN with muted beatings among which the organic vibrations and the effects of echoes structure the clanic rhythm of a tribe isolated in a universe of psychedelia. The percussions add to the heaviness while reverberating lines roar like elephants who run in the plains of the same universe. Pressed by the pulsating signals of a heavy bass, a rhythm is testing marvelously your subwoofer while flooding your listening room of dark and fascinating reverberating strands. That's how goes the first moments of EXISTENCE OSCILLATION (possible) FUTURE. NBN squeezes the lemon by extirpating an avalanche of sounds where hide layers of anesthetizing voices and very juicy arpeggios which shiver in front of the power of the percussions and the reverberating effects. Apparently exhausted, the introduction limits its sound eruption by borrowing an ambient passage where the white noises and other electronic effects crumble their tones in effects of resounding lassoes which whistle such as if a giant is trying to capture the void. Loaded of noises and of psychedelic voltage, the 3rd part of the title emerges at around the 11th minute with a line of bass pulsations less strong than the introduction and synth waves which float with alternative movements. Jean-Michel Jarre's influences can be heard here with these oscillating waves which waltz in a contiguous way in symbiosis with the bass beatings and which also attach the first melodic movement of this album. NBN uses all the seconds to the meter of the CD in order to exploit well the limits of 4 the long titles which fill its storage capacity.
The introduction of 745 Sekunden is like these twinkling reflections of a crystal clear water which shine in the sun. The current brings these sound prisms, which sparkle with a clear swiftness, towards a line of bass sequences of which the oscillatory arcs skip restlessly under spectral chants and a drizzle patch. The approach is almost harmonious. Various lines and layers of multiple colors get grafted to this waltz of fluids oscillations, as rhythmical as melodious. These 7 minutes of intensities and of boiling run madly into a phase of atmospheric elements where live confined pulsations and scattered beatings. The echo of these beatings plays moreover tricks on our hearing. The first time, I thought that there was really somebody who was walking in the house … I was alone! Sound hoops form throughout these percussive elements, bringing 745 Sekunden towards one finale even more resounding than the wildest moments of this album. Set apart the craziest ones of Der Himmel über ...Daniel B. and Dirk Bergen admit too Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream as engines of inspirations and it's more than clear on the monumental Gott Der Götter. Constructed no more and no less on the same principle as the famous Autobhan from Kraftwerk, the 25 minutes of this title borrow a minimalist bend with a rhythmic which runs and oscillates in Motorik loops, allowing the duo to add splendid floating layers very Jarre, a stream of electronic effects which make very Pink Floyd and Klaus Schulze, noises which are in accordance with the kind of tranquility of the music and riffs of synth which sculpt fragments of a Düsseldorf School style melody. The synth riffs which pour like some water through dozens of rocks and the subtleties in the flow of sequences, rolling like crazy balls on a conveyor in the front of this rhythm spread on some threadlike of oscillating loops, are giving the sublimity to this long minimalist title which at no moment brushes past a state of hypnosis. Wonderful and grandiose! Playing on the same principle of dynamistic Motorik rhythm, Der Himmel über ... flirts dangerously between the tolerable and its opposite. Armed of fat sequences which resound by bouncing, the title moves forward with the same stubbornness as in Gott Der Götter, but in another form. When the riffs fall and that a voracious sound passion follows an avalanche of percussions by a massive injection of jerky effects, the music becomes less subtle and more aggressive. A little as a theme music of horror which covers ungraceful scenes, the music follows its passions and its madnesses, giving a more biting cachet to this emotive accentuation which eats downright a music surfing on two waters until its rather chthonian finale. I found that very intense but all the same rather acceptable. But a thing remains for sure; my ears have made the discovery of a magnificent album which demonstrates without any doubts that EM shines of its thousand lights in the kingdom of Syndromeda. Solid in all the aspects, and there is a lot,EXISTENCE OSCILLATION (possible) FUTURE is a crush and undoubtedly the most beautiful album to ally the foundations of the old EM and the movement of the German progressive rock of the years 60 and 70. Audacious and melodious, hypnotic and attractive, this last opus of Nothing But Noise already leads my list for the most beautiful album of 2018! Go for it and treat your ears! Sylvain Lupari (April 27th, 2018) *****
Available at Nothing But Noise Bandcamp