Iron Forest, Body Horror, Crucial Blast, CD 020 (2013)
Iron Forest is a fairly new experimental music project by US Midwest artist Brandon Elkins that combines heavy industrial metal rhythms and riffs with drone, dub, noise and doom elements. “Body Horror”, the project’s second album, is a lavish effort: eight tracks of layers of power electronics, digital noise, warped dub, crushing machine rhythms, sharply cut reverb and space atmosphere, and elements of black / death / doom metal. The plastic case is a large DVD-style container with several postcards of pictures of mutant body parts that have a strange if repulsive and disturbing beauty.
The recording revolves around themes of mutation, deformity and transhumanism. Track 1 is a gentle introduction of reverb and fuzz, very spacey with spurts of dub rhythm, and highly atmospheric. Subsequent tracks range from fierce and threatening dub guitar-noise splatter with washes of shrieking vocals to doomy dronescapes set against an ambience suggesting post-apocalyptic industrial wastelands of polluted ponds of water and winds sweeping up fine sand mixed with industrial chemical dust. Although the music can be highly robotic and its rhythms dominated by echoing machine sounds, I always have the impression that here is a world in which biology and technology have become completely fused and to treat the two separately is an antiquated notion. All machine noises seem to come from cyborg creatures with self-awareness and cunning natures.
For music that draws its inspiration from past industrial metal heavies like Godflesh and Scorn who also included very liberal doses of dub rhythms and sounds into their work, “Body Horror” is as much atmospheric and meditative as it is harsh and grinding robot doom machine music. The surprising thing is that the music is very accessible and much less menacing than its title and artwork suggest. (The album is also much shorter than I would have liked – at least an hour would have done for this style of heavy industrial dub.) There’s a lot of murk along with the knife-sharp skittery quicksilver rhythms, the crunchy bass riffs and machine-gun synth percussion beats but the music never sounds chaotic or overwhelming. Parts of the CD remind me more of Keith Fullerton Whitman’s old Hrvatski act with the flighty rapid-fire blastbeat electronic rhythms, though without the playful attitude.
This genre of music has a lot of potential to be a mighty monster and I feel with most recordings I have that the artists are scraping just a thin layer of it. “Body Horror” doesn’t advance the known parts of the territory much but as it is, it’s quite a good work: it has a distinctive airy atmosphere in most tracks and there is a psychedelic trance element as well. Each track has enough in it that could generate a family of long remixed tracks.