SILVER BULLETIN – DIAMOND VIBRATIONS
Silver Bulletin’s second recorded offering, Diamond Vibrations opens with the rustle of leafy guitars in an ancient breeze. The track is called ‘Around Dead Sons’ - though it evokes less the mourning of departed men than a hushed time before homo sapiens. Pattering nylon strings mingle and meander, eventually sliding away, ushering in ‘Minding Time’ which establishes the lumbering pace of the record, and its near-shamanic, dusky folk sound (think Hush Arbors, Six Organs of Admittance). As with Silver Bulletin performances, the guitar and percussion playing is amateurish, the vocal delivery despairing yet resigned, as if somniloquently moaned by a world-weary pilgrim dozing by the embers of his campfire. In ‘Lady Gamma,’ the melody of a passing pan-piper finds its way into the Silver Bulletin’s dreams, in which he muses that Life is nothing but a Glimmer, and Reality is nothing but Chaos. ‘Treat Me Right’ sounds like the slow, painful death of a robotic barbershop quartet whose failing circuits have them stuck on merely two lines of lyrics, while closing tune ‘Only God Is Perfect’ is the record’s most traditionally melodic and pretty. A flock of melancholy guitar notes encircle the vocals, and the lone mage strums tenaciously in the desert. Then suddenly, after only 16 minutes, it’s over, silence reigns - you may find you feel the need to immediately play the whole EP again from the start. For though it’s not cheery, catchy or slick, it’s beguiling in a way that’s hard to fathom. You want to understand the source of its queer, hazy appeal – and as such it will draw you in again and again. Then again, maybe it won’t; this certainly isn’t a record for everyone. But it might just hit the spot as we approach the seasonal juncture between crisp but sunny mornings and oppressive winter gloom.
GILBERT FAWN – DEAD RHYTHM
Who is Gilbert Fawn? Little is known about the enigmatic figure, who walks like the night and vanishes like steam. Legend has it he’s got something to do with These Shipwrecks and the Ghost of 29 Megacycles. All one really needs to know is contained within his new release Dead Rhythm. The excursion begins with the brief, crystalline looping of ‘Island’ – sounding not like a grand entrance but rather the trailing egress of a lush cosmic mantra that you’ve accidentally stumbled upon. ‘Median’ arrives with eight bars of distant rhythmic droning, and one suspects it will continue in this vein – then without warning, the ‘grand entrance’ arrives, a serpentine bassline and exultant percussion crashing in to become a brilliant slice of wordless pop.
‘Distance’ pits a charming and melancholy guitar motif against a fuzzy, indecipherable vocal sample, before a glassy acoustic strum in ‘Dead Meat’ eventually joins drum machine and pumping bass to forge a groove of great momentum. Like ‘Median,’ it hints at a full-blown post-punk song, but holds back, instead remaining an instrumental wisp of beauty carried off in a morning mountain breeze. Any vivacity is quickly muzzled by ‘Boneka,’ a dark industrial soundscape that evokes some sort of machinated beast writhing in the distance, silhouetted grimly against a murky sunset; then, yet again, the mood is flipped – ‘Serpent Dance,’ offering a playful, near-elfin ditty. As a whole, Dead Rhythm continues to oscillate between subtle, earthy meanders and arresting – albeit unconventional – energetic pop, rock and folk progressions. The whole thing is infused with a sense of the exotic, and one suspects a multicultural range of instruments contribute to its sonic tapestry – still, the sampled conversational banalities of ‘Weekend’ and title of neighbouring track ‘Claremont Killer’ draw us back to the local.
What these two records jointly imply is that Grave New World will prove a fundamentally esoteric label, specializing in curious musical nuggets from peculiar pockets in space and time. With lo-fi production values and layered, Delphic compositions, these releases may not find a widespread audience; of course, one doubts they were intended to. What they do achieve is a sense of depth, originality and, perhaps most notably, palpable atmosphere – the kinds of things that will have you returning to scratch again at the surface, each time digging slightly further, gazing unto the shimmering realities that swirl within.
Grave New World releases are available from both the Etheric Hymns and Meupe online stores.
