专辑简介

Sylvgheist Maëlström hasn’t taken much of his time to produce the follow-up to his HANDS debut “Skaftafell”. On “Pripyat” he deals with transformation and extinction of nature, thus he discards the majestic minimalism of the predecessor and adopts a very different musical language, with chunky IDM rhythms and dense soundscapes to portrait the numerous disturbances man inflicts upon nature – and the way nature reacts to that, reinventing itself. A heavyweight, unsettling electronica album that is topped off with crackling remixes by [basementgrrr] and Yura Yura. Pripyat is the “nuclear city” where the Chernobyl power plant is located. Abandoned after the infamous 1986 disaster, it stands a rude reminder of man’s ruinous effect on nature – and the inimitable way nature achieves a weird comeback after the seemingly worst blow. Such forbidding thoughts are the main preoccupation Sylvgheist Maëlström used as an inspiration for this album, and it shows soundwise: Heavy rhythms throughout, sinister melodies, throbbing bass sounds, all tracks saturated with sharp-edged fuzz. “Pripyat” flows in a multi-layered sound design, which creates a constant atmosphere of unease, quite appropriate for tracks dealing with the world’s worst industrial disaster in “Bhopal”, where thousands died due to exposure to toxic substances in 1984, or “Agbog Bloshie”, the infamous e-waste dump in Ghana. Even the most seasoned connoisseur of electronic music will be challenged to discern on first listen all the details to be found within every single track as even the comparably calmer tracks like “Prion” (a fatally infectious protein composition) or “Mountain Pass” overflow with sounds, not to speak of the massive noise-flavoured tracks like “Ajka” (a town in Hungary where an industrial accident caused a flood of toxic mud in 2010). The contributed remixes by [basementgrrr] and Yura Yura remain within the sonic framework of “Pripyat”, but add dynamic bass sequences and a noise rhythm respectively. As an album, “Pripyat” serves a dual function: Each of the tracks is strong enough to stand alone, as a whole they merge into an utterly disturbing, yet absorbing 78 minute trip, a reminder that man is dying in his own changed substance.