Even-though this label, LOUDsilence (do you hear the whispering name, the soft whisper of this moniker?...), exists for a (limited) couple of years (I guess it was spawned from earthly mud and the intestines of our planet at the very beginning of 2024), it is way too underestimated, I think. Creating medicinal music for dark minds, it’s home within genres like Experimental, Noise, Drone, Industrial, Ambient, Electronics, you know, with releases by such acts like Fabriker [101], The Owl, Morbid Beauty, Crepuscular Entity, A Thousand Reasons, Whore’s Breath and so many other notorious (and lesser known) projects. So, this one’s for the label, this one’s for [L].
All I Am, Is Nothing is a new work by the grandiose outfit Marax, hailing from Carrollton, Georgia, and formed at the end of the former century. It’s a very productive act by Eric E. Crowe, responsible for tens of recordings, ranging from Dark Drone Ambient over Death Industrial to Power Noise Electronics, and everything in between. Amongst these releases are several collaborations with interesting colleagues, such as Sado Rituals, Coma Centauri, RedSK, Crepuscular Entity or Vomir, amongst others.
The material on All I Am, Is Nothing was recorded, mixed and mastered at Eric’s long-time recording p(a)lace Southern Discomfort Studios during Winter 2025-2026. It was independently released on May 11th, and heavily supported by additional release opportunities the day after, via aforementioned digital-only label LOUDsilence.
This four-tracker comes, by the way, with extremely fine cover artistry, being an old nostalgia-induced picture in black-and-white of a kid playing with a (fire) truck, dreaming away. Even the font, the type of letters used for the album’s title reflects a hint of melancholia, and so is the photo frame. Nice…
Because ‘Music’, and its creation, works therapeutical and beneficial for the artist, each of Marax’s releases are very personal and in-depth. It’s not a flight-reaction, nor a will to explain the troubles-of-mind; it’s a means to represent, or to shape a figure or an image, figuratively. With this one, it is even more obvious: a necessary utterance, an essential canalization to express negativity: ‘anger, sadness, grief, emotional fatigue, the quiet pressures that don’t always have a name’ (part in italic taken from the project’s biography). It’s the heaviness of daily life, and the struggle of being, that can fortify sonic creativity, as a therapy, and as an embodiment of urgency. All I Am, Is Nothing is the result of a period where things seemed little brighter and less destructive, ‘a way to externalize what would otherwise stay trapped inside’. This album is the result of the protagonist’s mindset, the audible outcome of dealing with life’s psychic gravity.
Well, the aural result is an extremely dense one. Opener Dimming (08:34) starts quite calm -introspective, if you want to- with a mono-sonorous drone-scape. After about two minutes, things expand, with additional layers of thunderous, reverberating deepness. Several strata of atmosphere and ambience join - some enlightened and materializing, others doomed and abyssal in essence. The rumbling / mesmeric core gets somehow veiled in a sonore mist of befuddling dimness, in a sonic dimension of down-tuned, joy-deprived integrity. Hypnotic Drone, if you want to. Absolution Ritual (07:11) is more intense, delving in quagmires of Death Industrial and Power Electronics, surrounded by Dark Drone Ambient effects and injections from different field-recorded sources. The rippling background works hypnotizing, the front-attack is harsh, intolerant, militant and malicious, despite its repetitive, even extenuating character. The thunderous effects, like exploding volcanic particles, reinforce the harsh-dramatic nucleus. The Burden Of Being (13:07) starts less pugnacious, yet at least as dreary and gloomy. A swift (or actually: not-that-swift) hint of Ambient Noise Wall passes by, for the droning and apprehensive textures hover quietly yet with certitude, hypnotizing and palliating. …though, the industrialized effects create a sense of discomfortable unease and confusion somehow. …and that’s not a negative remark, believe me! It’s rather meditative, even introspective in atmosphere, and dismal, uncanny and shrewd in execution. The last ‘song’, the title track (07:00), comes with addition of some spoken vocal sample (it frustrates me that I can’t find where this fragment comes from!). Anyway, it’s another long-stretched piece of eerie Doom / Drone / Ambient / Industrial grandeur, and probably the most experimental, and therefor open-minded, piece on this recording. All I Am, Is Nothing (the track) is a strongly asphyxiating epic, a secretive exertion of seclusion. All I Am, Is Nothing (the album) however is another monument of, well, confronting, anti-anti-liberal (mind the two ‘antis’!), aurally vindicated endorsement…
https://loudsilencedigital.bandcamp.com/album/all-i-am-is-nothing
https://marax.bandcamp.com/album/all-i-am-is-nothing-loudsilence-album
https://www.concreteweb.be/reviews/various-artists-join-warfare