Skullflower

Strange Keys to Untune Gods' Firmament

Neurot Recordings 2010

The UK's droning masters of sonic texturing, Skullflower unleash a double disk set that scrapes all the lining out of your ears over the course of its 2+ hours.  Each song is a suffocatingly dense wall of feedback and whitenoise that drills into your brain and hollows out your skull.  Shivering Aurora opens the album and if you didn't notice the subtle yet instantaneous shift to the next track you'd think it lasted through both disks as a single entity.  The second disk ends with Rheingold and it is only mildly different than the Shivering Aurora and the 10 tracks that lay in between the two.  It would be easy to drown in this sea of endless, shrill noise that is as impenetrable as the mysteries held by the vast darkness of deep space.  layer upon layer of hissing metallic distortion serve to form a dense wall of trance inducing fuzz.  But that is the crux of listening to these disks.  You have to be in exactly the right mood otherwise you will be completely overwhelmed by the oppressiveness of the pseudo-music.  And even if you are in exactly the right mood you still might suffer from a massive brain meltdown that leaves you feeling this is nothing more than pretentious audial overload designed to annoy rather than expand your mind.