It was the 2010 album of Whitehouse’s music that Reinhold Freidl ensemble recorded which first alerted me to the work of zeitkratzer. Since then, they’ve performed and recorded disparate array of works, ranging from the seemingly uncoverable ‘Metal Machine Music’ and to the most challenging compositions by Stockhausen and John Cage. In a contemporaneous blog, Bennett reported on being happy with the sound, but less so with the artwork, and even less so by the errors – not least of all the typographical flaws – in the booklet.
This time tackling another five tracks originally recorded by Whitehouse, the nine-piece orchestra are joined by William Bennett himself for the opening track, a scratchy, tense 12-minute rendition of ‘Daddo’ from the 1998 LP ‘Mummy and Daddy’. Bennett’s vocals are crisp and clear, and the backing is every bit as terrifying as on the original.
Heavy bottom-end drone like a nuclear wind funnels beneath nail-scraping screeds of feedback on the monstrous rendition of ‘White Whip’ (culled from Whitehouse’s 1992 ‘Twice is Not Enough’), and this is zeitkratzer at their absolute best, in that the sounds are beyond human and it’s almost inconceivable that they could be created using violins, double bass, piano, clarinets, French horn and trombone.
Unusually for Zeitkratzer , other tracks also include vocals, albeit distorted by funelling them down a trombone. Stretching way back to Whitehouse’s second album, ‘Total Sex’ , for ‘Foreplay’, the mangled noise they deliver is menacing and the skittering screech is skin-crawlingly uncomfortable as a tortured vocal screams into the void.
|
‘Fanatics’ captures the essence of the original perfectly: it’s dark and murky, a rumbling rhythm and inhuman moan press hard against an undulating swell of lower-end frequencies. A top-end fizz crackles and sparks and the whole thing throbs and builds in a way that resonates against the internal organs.
The stark, text-only cover art will hopefully get Bennett’s approval this time, too (although the typos in the booklet are likely to give him a seizure). Meanwhile, musically, zeitkratzer have truly excelled themselves there, and if Bennett’s vision is concerned with creating an extreme sensory experience, then zeitkratzer have fulfilled that here.
zeitkratzer Online
|
