I was quite surprised when I read the biography of Electric Sewer Age on some forum. Apparently this project nowadays run by Danny Hyde, indeed the guy behind e.g. Coil, Psychic TV or Aural Rage, was created by the Coil-fan John Deek in 2006, soon after joined by colleagues (deceased) Peter Christopherson (Coil, Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV) and aforementioned Danny Hyde. But they didn’t release anything official in years until the single Moon’s Milk In Final Phase (Coil material re-interpreted indeed) in 2012. Once again things went silent for a couple of years. At the very beginning of Summer 2014, Italy’s Old Europa Café released a six-track debut album, consisting of tracks that were composed essentially in 2006-2007. The album got brought out in an edition of 750 hand-numbered copies, and it contains quite explicit cover artwork.
Electric Sewer Age, however, isn’t exactly a continuation of Coil, despite some parallels. Initially it’s quite like a dreamlike and somewhat minimalistic construction of implicit melody-waves, softly electronic, modestly industrialised, kindly droning and space-like psychedelic. There is quite some ambience going on, extracting elements from synthetic structures from the unmeasurable Cosmos, canalising those ideas into open-minded yet, at the same time, subtly claustrophobic mind-twists. The whole experience is like a naturally-coherent journey though dimensions of the mind not explored yet. Floating synth waves are penetrated by cosmic psychedelic interruptions and dronedustrial excerpts, reminding the listener to the theory that the whole stands for more than the sum of the individual parts.
Bad White Corpuscle is a permanently growing, evolving process, building up, shrimping then again, before growing even bigger, stronger. It’s like a near-climax progression, a climax denial, before getting near to another (or a first) climax, denying it once again, and pushing the tension, the lust, the eager. It’s like a permanent craving for more, sadistically forbidding, over and over again.
After the quadriptych Grey Corpuscle – Corpuscular Corpuscle – Amber Corpuscle – Rising Corpuscle, the title track explores deeper aspects of endurance, e.g. by adding these trancelike beats and different vocal samples (ritual chants, spoken words, mechanical voices). I surely hear a hidden love tor the transcendental elegance of the Intelligent Dance Music scene. Black Corpuscle, finally, delves even deeper into the blackest abyss of the subconsciousness, like an omen for destruction, a self-fulfilling prophecy that announces the masochistic pleasures of formlessness and oblivion. Oblivion never to forget…
Rumours go that Danny will work / is working on a new Electric Sewer Age recording, since his activities with Aural Rage were put on hold (at least for a while). Hope is for fools, wishes are for infants; therefor I just impatiently look forward…