Hafler Trio, The ‎– All That Rises Must Converge

THE HAFLER TRIO have taken the art of juxtaposed ambient noise, electronic enhancement, mood atmospheres, stark contrasts & have made it their very own, and nowhere more obviously than on this album. "An Introduction To Go" takes abstract voice snatches, oddly misalligned rhythmic devices, ritualistic horns, aether-noise, crowded places (airport or railway station), cattle sounds & all manner of odd 'accidental' events & meld them into a definite composition. It has an unnerving feel to it yet is admirable in it's attempt at 're-locating' atmosphere & event into your home. "Of The Building Of Forms By Vibration" utilises the sounds of (apparently) nocturnal animals & birds, multi-layerig them & treating them, creating a disquieting alien atmosphere with their haunted noises. "The Howney Stone" again uses strange, quiet yet unnerving noises all blended into an atmosphere like a wind-blown mountainside with the sound of gunfire punctating the air cruelly. It transforms through electronics & other found crowd sounds. "A Luna Kanuta" is a long piece at over 11 minutes. Starting off with a dark, warm, close, metallic-tinted sound, expanding out into muffled & mutated crowd sounds which are treated, abused & multiplied over & over. "Blanket Level Approach #3" combines the sound of lapping water (presumably the sea upon rocks or pebbles) with a variety of factory-like Industrial sounds - cylindrical reverberations, humming machines, both in contrast yet with an uneasy symbiosis. "Captation #7 - 'Transilient Membranes'" is another long piece at nearly 11 minutes - a mulit-facetted amorphous drift of sound, layer-upon-layer of howling, floating, indefinable noise which changes gradually, afloat upon the air like thick cigar smoke, tumbling in slow-motion curls, thickening & thinning seemingly by chance. A vocal chorus nips in & steals the atmosphere for it's own Towards the end it moves through a much more stark series of sounds, from enhanced jagged noises to laughing children, to roaring noise to sudden vocal glissandos. "Buggy Whip Flings" in brief, combining screams, reverbed noises & gargling vocal sounds. "Captation #9 - 'SarekÖbe'" uses traffic sounds with crowd noises, creaking doors, echoed footsteps, and a vast assortment of other ambient & electronically-enhanced sounds. What appears to be people playing with balloons is amplified until it becomes a pure noise thing. Alien insect or amphibian calls combine with human & machine noises. "Strata Definition Test #10" kicks into it's complex life with muffled voice & echo feedback before becoming another minimal ambient thing which concludes wih snippit snatches of human voice. "Myriologue #2 - 'Calenture'" is another long piece kicking off with pure noise blast, then settling into another amorphous colage of overlayered images, both found and artificial, combining into something which considers itself a composition, having a certain cnformity of structure. This transforms throughout, complicating through a series of none-too-easily-defined noise changes, ending as it began with a blast of noise. "Myriologue #3 - 'Quonking'" is another fairly short piece, combining dog-yap-like hinge squeaks, electronically-enhanced water & other found sounds with the central focal point being a swirling series of gated atmospheres which whirl around before concluding in a high-pitched shriek. "MZVLNE" concludes the album being a deep, dense amalgam of incomprehensible crowd mumbling, stark keyboards & dark thunderous noise. It concludes with what sounds like a snatch from a teach-yourself foriegn language tape.

Originally reviewed for Soft Watch.