HERESY

Subterranean in it's darkness without the smallest chink of light. Good late night listening, where no matter how loud you play it, you're unlikely to wake the neighbours. There are no conventional instruments used at all - so you'll hear no drums, bass or guitar. This is one of those moody ambient albums that there were quite a lot of in the early 90's . Thankfully this is one of the superior ones and probably Lustmord's best in his whole catalogue.

He had links with SPK and Throbbing Gristle, so that'll give you some idea as to where he's coming from. 'Heresy', however is far more subdued than the aforementioned.

Oscillators, rumbling electronics and faint semblances of 'tune' are pretty much the order of the day, but it's pretty cohesive and far less repetitive than the follow up 'The Monstrous Soul'.

I guess most will find this either too creepy or too boring to be entertaining. Personally I've a real soft spot for this kind of doomy soundscape malarky. Prog fans beware - there ain't no prog here!

There are however, some pretentious liner notes in the booklet, like most Lustmord albums, which makes me shake my head and think 'You Muppet!'.

Don't look to 'Heresy' if you're after action and adventure with blazing guns and car chases. This is a very slow, rolling and ominous album which sounds like the after effects of the front cover painting. Either that, or the discovery that there's alien life on Europa beneath the ice.

Very annoyingly, my original has disc rot on the last 14 minute track (Soleilmoon 1990 release - don't buy it!)

Play loud and crank the bass up to maximum to make your heart skip a beat...

Slow descent to the obscure!

Before anything else, this is close to contemporary classical music (i.e. Stockhausen's "Trans"), rather than the average prog rootings, which explains the low ratings, for such an exquisite work. But that seems irrelevant as soon as you open the gates of Lustmord's "Heresy" 1990.

As opposed to expectations, this "Heresy" is minimally constructed. It deals close to the "Minimalistic/Ambiental" tagging also, if you happen to be living in hell of course!

And this is exactly where this work stands out., instead of playing all the possible exagerations depicting this "underworld" or hell or whatever dark or un- gods you pray on, these environments assume you as an already living being in these lands. The air you breathe, the colors missing, the feeling of living in such an unlighted place and yet still be left to dwell free in its "godless" beauties.

No horror-movie antics or "wild" useless fireworks!

Impeccable, dark, minimal, weightless electronics, outlining a possible heretic and "peaceful" portrait of our own known and obscure and sad planet earth.

(Yes! This is not "happy" prog, not at all!!)

****4 PA stars.

B. Lustmord's own notes on Heresy claim that the album was recorded in various underground locations and is based around "psycho-acoustic phenomena and the physical effects of low frequency information" - in other words, it's a slow-paced ambient album in which not very much happens, but what does happen is deeply spooky with it. Constituting either actual field recordings or cleverly faked ones - it's hard to tell - this is an album which will rumble on mysteriously in the background before ambushing you with strange little events, like a gun blast followed by bestial snarling and the wail of a child. I am not sure what is supposed to be happening here, but I do know I am supposed to be afraid of it - and the album accomplishes that mission just fine.