Pretty fine noisy churning density from Strangerous of Norway…her Chant (NO LABEL) release arrived as two CDs packed into a chipboard wallet complete with her own raw and primitive linocut design.
Just four tracks across a brace o’ discs, but she sees fit to express herself at some length, soon creating a thick and inescapable wall of rubble around the listener, which is most welcome. Take ‘Conundrum’ which initiates the novice into the aquarium…maybe a root note resonating throughout, maybe simple repeated loops, amounting to an abstract painting wall, the whole thing replete with textures galore. Aren’t we all facing “conundrums” in our daily lives where the mind can’t help thinking and cogitating, turning over an insoluble problem like a gigantic Rubik’s cube in the noggin, leading to loss of sleep and irritability? Well, here’s the perfect soundtrack for that neurotic lifestyle…I won’t say it helps you solve the problem, but you can certainly enjoy the “endless loop” effect with a lot more aesthetic delight.
Click on to ‘Chant of the Vultures’ – I know some of you reading this will now be thinking “you had us at vultures”, and you’d be right. More loops and similar crumbly sounds (Strangerous seems to handle noise the same way a gardener sifts the soil through a rusty sieve), but poked into a slightly more bleak and skeletal framework. The dust may have settled, but you don’t want to see what’s in the sky or looming over the horizon. This is the kind of “chant” that either keeps the birds of prey from your door, or summons them towards it. Speaking of chants, the short press note tends towards the rather familiar turf of “ritual contexts” and “acting as a unifying force”, as the writer attempts to account for human behaviour with a little bid of cod-sociology. But I don’t care so much about that, when the rugged sounds she’s serving up here make highly effective use of the simple repetition device without clouding the issue with too much extraneous candle-wax.
On the second disc, the neurosis and darkness are increased by factors of about 3 or 4 microniums, as we enter ‘Conflicts in a Dreamer’s Life’, a title which probably would have delighted Rene Magritte or Paul Delvaux, but as Strangerous reminds us, that cosy pre-war life is over now and the dreams of the 21st century are extremely troubling. The distorted-voice gloop mumbling its way through this horrifying non-terrrain is surprisingly effective…you feel like if you listen hard enough, the utterances of this grotesque ogre will start to make sense. Strangerous thus evokes the experience of a dream, rather than merely describing it. There’s also ‘Compulsion’, another chapter in the ongoing mental-illness subtext which I perceive underpinning this release, where once again the repeated elements take on an obsessional quality. If there’s a protagonist in the middle of this vague morality play, you can feel them being pulled into a vortex by their own senseless actions, yet they can’t stop doing it. Very deep!
Strangerous is Nora Elise Stemland, and this is her third release after Ascendant Abyss and Death By Anticipation. From 26 September 2022.