Lull – Dreamt About Dreaming

The review below was based on a pre-release cassette demo:
I have no idea of titles or format or even whether the tape will be released. The first track seeps from the speakers in a cycling morass of bio-mechanicsl sounds - naturally evolved heavy machinery changing shape, growing, part animal, part plant, virtually indescribably unearthly, its voice bird-like, it's body functions as regular as a factory rhythm. This is not music, but a series of looped noises which build up, break down, becoming malign & immense, fading to a passive mellowness. This could easily be an gargantuan being, dwelling between the stars, it's body evolving instantly to changes in temperature, alert to any danger. The next piece opens with a hint of form in clattering. distant drum patterns. This soon disappears, leaving the swirling white metal floss, barbed & poisoned, as lithe as worm-thin serpents, squirning around. It sounds benign, but don't trust it - it's too alien for known reactions. It moves without body, without easily-described form. Perhaps this is the soundtrack to some sci fi film - it could certainly add a little sense of coolness to images of space void. In parts it seems to want to break into form, battering drum-like, looking for liberty. The next piece is darker still - a deep swirling sound-image of some Hadean landscape, smoke from naked fissures, molten rock spurting or crawling with stealthy ease. All around, strange alien sounds seen to indicate immense movement and percussive sounds, too regular to be anything natural, add to the unease. After a while you realise it forms a regular cycle, but you'd have to stretch licence to calling it 'rhythm'. The next piece follows a similar style, with voice speaking over the reptilian biological background loop. Keyboards, low & menacing, circle the speaker like ripples in curtains which might be the breeze, or some being lurking with ill intent. Through this bursts an outcrop of dark sound with a regular metal & blast sigil which grows larger & deeper as the track continues, it's darkness asphyxiating the lower swirling sounds. It reminds me a little in mood & voice of THE SWANS at their moodiest, yet the sound itself is more akin to COLD MEAT INDUSTRY.

This is very different from his work with SCORN & should please the fans of darker, non-beat Industrial.

Most of this album was reviewed above, but here is a track by track analysis. My original version was on poor quality tape, but hearing it now on CD, it could very well qualify for 'classic' status. I guess you'd say it is a collection of moods, of dark soundscapes, but this hardly says anything about the album. It's chilling without being Evil, dark & suggestive without blatantly slitting your throat. The mood is often one of calm, not because it uses harmonic sounds (quite the opposite), but because most tones used have the top honed away to give a smoother, darker, and yes, more sinister sound. People into Pure Noise who want something a little more calming, or those into the COLD MEAT INDUSTRY-type non-beat sound should consider their money well invested in this album.
"Stream Endless" opens the album - nearly 12 minutes of strange, slowly drifting soundscape, as disturbing as anything by TG in it's dehumanised isolation. "Time" continues the motionless mood, this time adding a motionless percussive tune - simple, almost mechanical, it reminds me strongly of tracks off SPK's "Zamia Lehmanni" album - calming yet painted in dark hues, and way in the distance Industrial sounds add further strangeness. "Open Closed Apart" is the sound of mechanical devices, turning bone-crushing millstones while steam escapes from the machines which drive them. 'Found' voice tells us 'very soon the drug will cause the subject to experience death-like paralysis'. "Eyes Through Walls" has a deep, dead drum sound forming a gristle-like foundation for haunted sounds to grow from far in the distance, and a fleece-like sound, like the ghosts of chains, joining the sluggish Styx-like Industrial river on it's gradual journey down to Hell. A human voice, carried on the foul waters, repeatedly confirms his realisation that 'I'm going to Hell' in a resigned, GIRA-like voice. "Beating within" is an enormous churning cauldron of effected sound, circling in echoed motion like a whirlpool of amorphous audio-stew, punctuated by minimal, almost ritualistic drumming, as if the player were gentling some strange Spirit-Demon into life after aeons in dead slumber. "Travels" sounds like an Eastern celebration, honed through banks of FX into a gradually changing loop of noise. Over this various sounds gain & fail - a lonely goat awaiting sacrifice - sentient black clouds roiling...too low! "Unlit Passage" is more structured, less a dense soundscape, although it in no way even approaches 'normal' composition - a series of almost percussive blasts of indistinct noise, related only vaguely into something like a pattern. "Dreamt About Dreaming" is probably the most approachable piece on the album with repeated phrase in SWANS' style saying 'Dream On' & 'I'm Alive' as if the man who went to Hell has returned, Hercules-like, to the Lucid realisation he is only having a nightmare. Opening on sound like boiling rocks, it gradually builds up into a more complex piece, to intensity building like the rush of coital climax. Amorphous megaliths of sound combine with metalwork, combining to create a huge, smashing beat pattern. Generator-like drum machine rises up to give the sound added drive & direction. "Stream Endless Part 2" is a weird pattern of percussive synth, tuned into an abstract rotating twin helix, smashed & rearranged into something closer to a lightning-struck tree.

Originally reviewed for Soft Watch.

I'm hoping to know if this was also released by Subharmonic in the US around 1995, UPC 026617702021.