Campbell Kneale and Ilkka Vekka are each responsible for some of the most colourful experimental music I’ve enjoyed; Birchville Cat Motel’s ‘Beautiful Speck Triumph’ still stands as a fucking triumph of uplifting, epiphanic drone, and particularly early Haare material such as ‘The Temple’ is rampant with brushstrokes and shades, a pulsing and vivid psychedelia drenching the material and wringing lysergic acid diethylamide from its harsher industrial scenes.
In resurrecting an overlooked Golden Vomit recording for Campbell’s Celebrate Psi Phenomenon label, however, Ilkka explores the shadowed side of drone enjoyment: a grainy electronics haze which has snuffed out aspirations of musicality and replaced those with a defiant minimalism which reduces its sound to a vacant expression and monochrome palette.
“Part 1” is a slow but constant billowing of featureless smog, unseen chimneys pumping out thick airborne particles which line the lungs and burn the eyes. Machinery thud, muffled vehicular movement and a slowed warning siren are all hinted at from underneath the thick cloud of suffocating grey without ever overcoming it, until a wash of ghosting feedback joins the piece towards it conclusion – without giving any urgency or sharpness to the piece, and instead seeming to deepen the distance of the scene without yielding any more shape or detail.
“Part 2” has none of the churn of the first side, its particles suspended in mid-air and moving softly as pockets of soft current hit them, the oppressive surround of the first part reduced to a laconic drift on the second. The outcome is as dispassionate and music-less as fragments of an intonarumori cast into the eye of a hurricane, again relying on intangible mid-range electronics haze with an absolute minimum of ephemeral sounds – and not even the hint of progress which the first part was willing to share.
Whatever life affirmations artist or label may have acknowledged in the past, ‘Beyond All Reason’ is having none of it. Even if “Part 1” acknowledges the ugly industrial footprint of human existence, “Part 2” seems entirely removed from that presence. While artistically removed, ‘Beyond All Reason’ has more in common with the rejection of development and form found in acts like Vomir, than the slow-motion but overt gestures of Ilkka’s flagship project. The reward as listener is in losing time and reality to sound: in not requiring anything more than to succumb to a numbing nothingness.
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