NATURE

When Kostya contacted me to let me know that there was a new Disen Gage album available I was of course excited as they are one of my favourite Russian bands, but I was also intrigued as this is what it said in the email. "This story started a long time ago, when the participants of Disen Gage scoured in the night in the dangerous vicinity of the Moscow railroad station "Sortirovochnaya" trying to capture fascinating sonic roulades emitted by the wagons. At the same time, on the other side of the globe, in the State of Iowa, astronomers succeed in converting strange signals coming from the orbit of Jupiter into audible sound palettes. Later, in an Australian swamp, Mrs. Toad said to Mr. Crocodile: "Dude, why not concoct a Tops-of-the-Pops album of all those ingredients, one on which we would sing all together?" "I'll call Mr. Bear, my Siberian friend. He knows how to mix all stuff with a beat", answered Mr. Crocodile. Finally, the Nature, crafted from sounds of planets, trains and animals including higher primates, is now in your hands. Still we wonder how the human ear will take this?"

I know how most people would take this, they would listen to ten seconds, scratch their head as if trying to make sense of it, then discard it, probably with extreme prejudice. Me? I'm made of sterner stuff than most, and will happily branch into areas of RIO and progressive rock that are more commonly referred to as noise (yes, it's a genre). This album isn't meant to be easy to listen to, it's not meant to be something that will ever be played on the radio or to be hummed under breath while driving, this is all about challenging the very term "music" and wondering just how far that boundary can be stretched while still making it something that people, at least some people, will want to listen to. I find this music enthralling, almost hypnotic in the way that it drags me in, using sounds that are industrial, mechanical, other worldly and not even created by the band, twisting them into something that is not recognisable in its original form

There are very few bands who can say to be actually progressing in the truest sense, as opposed to the regressing that many seem all too fond of, but Disen Gage are creating a path that only the brave will follow. Are you one of them?

The latest-to-date curveball by the unpredictable Russian band Disen Gage is even more obscure than their 2017 live-in-the-science-lab soundtrack "Hybrid State", and easily earns my vote as the most difficult album of the year. But like all challenging music the effort needed to appreciate it makes the rewards more gratifying...especially to masochists.

This is a group (now just a duo) willing to sever all ties to conventional music-making and embrace more dangerous creative impulses: musique concrete, industrial noise, and all the environmental dissonance of their troubled homeland. The two remaining Disen Gagers - Konstantin Mochalov and Anton Efimov - are both listed as guitarists, but you'd be hard-pressed to hear anything resembling a traditional guitar anywhere over the album's three long sound-assemblies (you won't, under any circumstance, confuse them with 'songs').

The album opens with a shocking burst of interplanetary noise: the real thing, using documentary tapes from (according to the band) Iowa astronomers "converting strange signals coming from the orbit of Jupiter into audible sound palettes". Did they spot a mysterious black monolith circling the planet as well? The sense of cosmic disorientation would be no less startling...

The atonal cacophony lasts for 16+ minutes, at one point briefly incorporating background snippets of actual music (I hear a saxophone..!), credited to a "Zen Porno rock-band recorded in the vicinity of Jupiter" but possibly an outtake from an earlier Disen Gage session, back when the band was a legitimate group, performing on real musical instruments.

Next up is "Trains": a collage of metal-on-metal ambience recorded after hours at a Moscow railway station, the "fascinating sonic roulades emitted by the wagons" looped into a semblance of rhythm. There's really no comparison, but the harsh yet hypnotic effect recalls the uneasy slumber of Tangerine Dream's proto-ambient "Zeit", reduced to its elemental brain-wave basics.

"Animals" then combines the two preceding soundscapes into an unruly zoological sh!t-show, with a storm of bestial noises plundered from the natural world: check out the long, tongue-in-cheek guest list for the track. I'm reminded of something the early Residents might have spliced together, in their pre-eyeball mask adolescence...at least until it erupts suddenly into a raucous, Post-Everything rock loop, so over the top (when the wolves begin howling) that it's hard not to respond with astonished laughter.

In all, it's a unique and oddly compelling achievement, requiring yet another defense of the often misunderstood two-star ProgArchives grade. If five full stars acknowledge an essential masterpiece, two stars must be the connoisseur's rating: not a measure of relative quality, but a mark of distinction for albums aimed strictly at aficionados.