Guess who’s back? flush with post-infectionary zest & more real-time world-turmoil than the mind can manage – it is the wonderful Illusion of Safety.
Those outside the secret are looking at what we can lazily constrict to a cult & influential “Industrial-Noise-Ambient” act running right back to the early 80s. Prolific as hell, & actively pioneering, IOS has been marshalled by Dan Burke, who’s creative operations on the project on occasion include others.
He threw in the psyche vat somewhere around the 2017 mark (see post “Exit the Illusionist”) & disappeared.
& thus to the 2020 revival & the resulting album New Rules in 2021 on German label Drone Records.
This is a great album. i thought IOS veered a bit during the very late stages before the hiatus, but the new material here is excellent.
Modes & moods spiral significant alterations throughout the groups many recordings. Here we have a pseudo-subdued, often eerie & unsettling array of undecided menacing & lurking machinations.
Nebulous, pre-panic shape-shifting accosted by periodic & often piercing electronics.
Tons & tons of other sound source substance pervades throughout on a wide scale of gradients (overt, slight, extreme, opaque, modest, dramatic, fleeting, consistent).
IOS function on a different approach or concept to time (part of the reason why I am not going to insult the music by trying to composite an excerpt mp3 of this album) where situation, interruption, eliciting, decent, entrancing, apotheosis, manipulations & modulations of mind & modals & gradual reorientation, immersion & solicited sensitivity can yield alternate scenarios & perception.
Goddammit! Sounds like overanalysed academic codswallop, but the shit is true …. It is an entirely different way of engaging sound & emotional medium, where stretched time perhaps enables rarer creeds of sentiment & sound.
although enjoyable en route, full consumption is quite necessary with these often abstruse & wandering tracks, who’s full shape is often only really conclusively appreciated on total completion.
Soundscapism & irregular construction.
It is a lot more than just noise, Industrial or electronics.
& it would be absolutely incorrect to mis-identify it as simply “experimental”.
“IOS’ work has been called ambient, post-industrial, electro-acoustic, noise, sound collage, improvisation, and power electronics, but they are unwilling to limit their work to any given style or method. The sonic character and affective substance of the music will often shift abruptly within each recording and live performance.”
New Rules is an impressive return for this distinguished sonic radical & intrepid investigator of outer & inner boundaries.