First is a composition from experimental artist Alex Campbell's project Consulate. The latest record, "Black Narcissus", is an exercise in bleak, urban malaise, filled with brvtal drum machines and haunting soundscapes. "Panzer" is a rhythmic exploration in dark pounding techno and ambient noise. We asked the artist to say a few words about the release and received the following:
Black Narcissus had a fragmented recording process - the majority of tracks were recorded in the space of about two weeks, while I was housebound with a burst eardrum and wasn’t able to submit myself to loud volumes. The remaining two were recorded roughly a year later, building on the ideas and moods I felt I’d created with the first side - attempting to add other elements, both sonically and aesthetically. The end result is something that I hope to be as pure a distillation of my overarching influences as I could have mustered at the time of recording.
The initial tracks were heavily influenced by an aesthetic that, in my mind, was a specific combination of media both sonic and visual. European football culture; World War 2 history; the 1984 film Threads; Cold War dread; Come & See; Jorge Luis Borges; the Croatian War of Independence & related Balkan conflicts, and a broad and highly generalized sense of ‘futurism’. Trying to capture the feeling of something ancient, worn-in but at the same time out of reach, unfamiliar and completely foreign.
It should be quite obvious what music or musical style I’ve referenced in any way during any of these tracks, but to simplify it – jungle, EBM, 90s techno, psychedelic music.
Panzer was an attempt to convey a sense of dread and unfamiliarity. It is probably the only track on the release for which I had a clear idea of the mood I needed to convey, which was directly influenced by Elem Klimov’s 1985 masterpiece Come and See. Being an instrumental, the main cue is in the title of the track, along with martial drum patterns and a sound palette that existed in my head as green, brown and grey. I didn’t intend for it to a club track, or a track that could realistically be played to a dancefloor – its structure exists mainly as a framework in which I could paint on and erase sounds as I saw fit.
