12122011

Sobre A Màquina - Areia (2011)

(drone / drone doom metal / industrial)

The first time I listened to Sobre A Máquina was an unintentionally terrifying moment. I had moved all of my stuff out of my apartment and the only things left were the four gray walls, a flat mattress and my nearly ancient, yet still sound-producing, speakers. I had forgotten my speakers on a volume just slightly too loud and when I pressed play on Lingua Negra I was met with a drill that drove straight into my eardrums and seemed to escape out of every hole in my body. I was left immobilized on the floor with the hauntigly slow melodies starting to occupy my mind. I couldn't turn the volume lower because some sadistic part of myself was already enjoying the cacophony created by the music bouncing off the empty walls of my flat, creating a vortex of echoes that made me balance on the verge of sanity.

Hailing from Brazil the band delivers a sound you might necessarily not expect. There is no cheer, no uproar, no emotion in this music. Areia presents the sounds of an abandoned factory in a world that seized to exist an eternity ago. The machines produce nothing and run on anything. Barca, a broken ship, is somehow full of unknown melacholy. Machinery of sadness.

The general sound of the album is quite raw and the line of enjoyment is not far. Consisting of only four tracks you would like them to form an entity as opposed to being singular track productions. Foz, for example, would work as a towering single piece of music but is not a team player, grasping all the attention.

A few years from now, I would like to have the same echo-experience with a matured Sobre A Màquina in a white apartment room with the resemblance of a sanitarium studio. A factory of dead sounds that would make me feel alive.

26072011

Two People In A Room - Two People In A Room (2011)

(ambient / drone)

There are moments in your life when the world comes to complete halt. It seems like everything around you turns into slow motion, the clocks stop from turning and your movements become as intricate as the instincts of a highly fragile being. Your touch becomes light, yet smooth as silk, as your fingers run on the bare back muscles of the person lying next to you. The room is empty - normally there would be furniture, pictures, mirrors, everything you can find in a normal room. Yet, this day is simply not normal. You are the only two elements in the room and there is nothing else.

Two People In A Room  is a Berlin-based ambient/drone duo formed by Michelle Hughes & René Margraff in September 2009. I had never heard of them until this album, which captured a certain day of my life instantly. Ambient music needs to be very descriptive in order to penetrate into the unconscious of the listener. There are no vocals, barely any melodies even. The music needs to create an atmosphere so vivid that it fills the entire room with its spirit, yet it must go unnoticed as the shadows over a dirt path - it cannot interfere with your thought process.

Side By Side and Crash Your Plane, Walk Away begin the album off by processing through 20 minutes of your life to absorb you into the world the rest of the album will create. The occasional sounds of the guitar combined with the hum in the background create a stagnant feeling and leave you immobilized for a moment. The feeling is lost throughout the slow chord progression of Holiday On Air Force One, which creeps up to its climax without never really reaching it, leaving the listener hoping for something never to come.

The album is not a flawless mixture of ambient sounds but it manages to grasp the single feeling of being alone with someone in a room. Inside the room the world revolved around you, you are the world. As solid as the album is, I felt no addiction towards it. Two People In A Room set the bait well but forgot to plant the hook inside it.