Beyond Sensory Experience – Modern Day Diabolists

This is truly a remarkable album. The greatness of this album reveals itself when the beautiful soundscapes turn into eery noisy patterns - revealing thereby the diabolistic side of the recording. It is nor mere good karma. But I have to agree with the Old_Captain that it leaves me with a very good feeling - so it spends good karma in the end.

The sounds of the city, open your window and let them in. Or, you could just put on this record and merge seamlessly into the tapestry of street lights, asphalt, concrete, glass and steel. If you combined John Foxx's Cathedral Oceans with Tor Lundvall and then mixed in the decadent tapestries which Tholen or Northaunt weave while simultaneously tearing your clothes apart and grinding ashes into your skin, this is what you'd get. Look outside at passers by and then imagine being able to see into their minds; bear witness to the chemical reactions their thoughts incur and then see how their countenance darkens. If you sometimes lie awake during the small hours (as I've been known to here and there), you can faintly hear the heart of your metropolis beating... you sometimes may even see it's lifeblood pumping through the avenues, down the alleys, across the bridges. Into the very buildings themselves. It is a rare gift to summon this kind of awareness and then capture it sonically as this pair have done, just because nothing moves perceptibly doesn't preclude the possibility that it is alive.

Ghostly wisps of thick and aching longing move across the length of Modern Day Diabolists and pull you in. Like rain against the panes of glass, each note and each movement of brooding sonic contemplation distort your ability to see what is going on around you. The lights of passing cars, those echos of what was whip past you like a cold vicious wind blowing down the sidewalk. There is much you can learn from silence and these two have obviously spent quite a bit of time in the hidden and hushed spaces which even an urban landscape can contain. In the train yard in the early morning hours, listening to the symphony of rails as the metal twists and groans back into shape after being rapaciously contorted by the demands of industry; this is where you'd find them. With their microphones poised and the record button delicately depressed so as not to disturb their surroundings. I myself have been in this esoteric terrain they depict on more than a few occasions.

Far up on the island with the rotted timbers of docks long forgotten as the trees slowly encroach to reclaim what was theirs, the black waters lap at the rocky formations and quietly gnaw away at decrepit foundations of buildings which have been abandoned for decades. Rust tinges the metal of mothballed dry docks while a little further down the line, those rails weave through the dessicated wilderness like veins which infuse life into the oily viscera we like to call civilization. To walk slowly amongst crumbling architecture that is rotting before your very eyes. As you pick your way through upended walls and furniture hurled this way and that, you look back down at where you've come from and come to the unnerving realization that where you are now once was exactly like the tidily organized grid of streets and shops you wandered away from. Just as the overgrown sigils of settlements abound in the city you call home, so one day they'll return to the natural order they sought to overpower.

I can walk upon the mercury riddled sand and know that once, long ago, it towered over these brackish polluted waters like a giant. The inexorable creep of time's chisel is what lies at the heart of Modern Day Diabolists; go ahead and enjoy your progress, cover it all with your plague of population this record sneers. For each step forward we take, an older and incalculably more powerful force moves forward as well. Like chess pieces which are arranged at first in and orderly fashion, the skirmishes between each side eventually reduce one to a maimed minority begging for the check mate to be achieved. I suspect you readers know just as I do what side we're on and how inglorious our fall will be. In the meantime, while the fading light remains, listen to what Beyond Sensory Experience have crafted and prepare yourself. It won't be much longer now.

On this great recording BSE have finally found their golden section of organic ambiences and chilling slow motion rhythmic patterns plunged into huge spaces. The musicians call themselves 'modern day diabolists' but they do eradiate good karma. An overwhelming album!