Great news, another Nick Hoffman solo record of dismal, unsettling noise called Necropolis (ORGANIZED MUSIC FROM THESSALONIKI t26) …about which the first thing we notice is the near-absence of imagery on the cover artworks…front cover is a plain grey-green field which might as well be a slab of marble with his own named carved on it, since this is clearly another ultimate “death” record, judging by the title…inner gatefold, if we can call it that, could be an extreme close-up of bricks and mortar, suggestive of the mausoleum’s walls…and that’s about it, apart from a rare photo of the artist himself included as an insert. Label owner Kostis Kilymis did the visuals for this one, and he’s also justifiably excited about the “extremes in volume and texture” of this release, and its “strong conceptual framework”. I think this both indicates Hoffman’s ongoing commitment to creating very considered, carefully-composed releases, even when the uninformed civilians of the Anti-Noise League can’t perceive much more than walls of harsh noise.
Frightening away such non-participants in its early moments, Necropolis sets up an initial barrage of evil noise that is the first barrier we have to pass…a death trap involving barbed wire, scalding acid, and unscaleable walls. Once inside the Necropolis, what do you find…alternating passages of mysterious quiet grumbling hiss layered with sudden and terrifying explosions of electronic noise, a carefully prepared schema that freezes the cadavers on one side, while roasting them in the crematorium on the other. Gradually, this strategy starts to settle down and the sounds we encounter become more mysterious, intangible, inaudible, fleeting…some of them are like little worms munching away at our coffins, our bones and our decaying hair. By the time of track 4, we’ve reached a certain stability in the music (perhaps a resignation to our fate might be a better way of putting it), and the previous disjunctiveness is replaced by continuity, a map which (however illogical) we might use to find our way around this palace of death, the passageways lit by the fitful beam from a firefly…
Then there’s the final track which we hope might raise us from the burial chamber back to the light…over some 16 minutes of agonising slowness and insufferable crackly low-key noise, you might discern a gradual forward movement which you can interpret as you will. You hope the promise of rebirth of the Egyptian Pharaohs may come to pass, but you’ve got layers of two thousand year-old wrappings to dispense with first. No wonder he named this track ‘The Scent Of Ground Teeth’; there’s a man who knows how his audience reacts…
Speaking of titles, this one and two others – ‘The Rotten Core’ and ‘Den Fuss Im Nacken’, a German phrase which roughly translates to ‘Foot in the Neck’ – are redolent of various stages of bodily decay. The other two titles ‘Eros’ and ‘Love Triangle’ I would take as evidence of Hoffman’s bid to articulate these Freudian drives – ‘Eros and Thanatos’ was how that 19th-century bearded fraud identified them – in terms of abstract electronic noise. Net result, an experience that is far more bleak and cathartic than anyone could expect, least of all Dr Freud himself with his prissy Viennese tea-cakes and soppy women wearing silly hats in his consulting room. If you are seeking art that goes into the furthest realms of the dark and the unknown (but not doing so simply to violate taboos or shock your bourgeois values) then Hoffman is currently one of the most intelligent and thorough explorers we have in this area. From 15 December 2014.