Michael Northam & Martin Franklin ‎– An Opening Of The Earth

If you have had enough of the passive pastel mood music created by the likes of VIDNA OBMANA and TUU, then this might just be for you. Set between a passive, rolling, drifting beauty and the eviscerated android guts of a more extreme Industrial music, this is dream music to inspire the worst of nightmares. Raw electrics (too raw to be electronics) buzz, boom and sizzle against a charming backdrop, sharing centre stage with nerve-jarring loops and creative electronics to form ever-transmuting, floating patterns, mutant soundscapes and dehumanised acid baths of softly rolling noise. This truly is a hybrid of two extremes - the harsh, raw electronics of extreme noise and the warm welcome of smoother passive music.

I feel that this album wouldn't have seemed too far out of place on the ANCKARSTROM label, yet it manages to create an uneasy and often disturbing calm. If it were looking for kinship, it might find it among the CERTAIN ANTS' album and perhaps the APPLETON / LEAKE tape, maybe the ARCHEGON stable would give it home - it certainly has a certain similarity to some of KARL GERBER's work.

Not always easy to listen to, certainly not at any great volume, this nevertheless is an important work. It takes you to places which are simultaneously pacifying and threatening, sweet and sordid. Edgy, raw and often quite beautiful, this is an astonishingly good recording for a cassette release, deserving of a higher quality release.

Originally reviewed for Soft Watch.