You’ll never guess what this is… nope, it’s the album art for Attached, by Cullllt! Oh, you said that? Sorry, I wasn’t listening. I like the brown and grey blurred abstract image, it’s very non-representational and somehow strangely emotive.
Artist: Cullllt
Title: Attached
Label: None
Cat#: None
Keywords: Noise, Drone, Ambient, Dark Ambient, Sound Art, Shoegaze, Improv, Cassette Tape
Reviewer: Alex Spalding
Sometimes I wish I could bring my saxophone around with me everywhere, just in case anything should happen warranting its use. Like if I were to stumble upon two people having exhibitionist sex someplace or something. There was a time once that a couple friends and I went to a secluded park late at night… a car was parked nearby in which two people were having sex… if I’d had a saxophone with me at that moment, I could have serenaded them with the sexy sound of sax. That surely would have increased the pleasure of that moment, for all of us. Of course, I play alto sax, which has a sweet, light sound, not quite as deep and sultry as the tenor, but still. Sax is sax. Anyway, Cullllt is a Zurich-based musician, a saxophonist and experimenter who’s music features cassette-tape manipulation, Casio and Yamaha keyboards, found objects, field recordings… and love. Can’t wait to tell you about this one!
It begins with ‘Attached’, the title track, and sounds at first very soft, like rain or tape static is slowly coming into focus. There are very low bass tones creeping in, I hear what sounds like a trickling of electronic piss, and some thunder. A dissonant, harsh, Silent Hill-esque noise structure immanentizes. I hear flutes, a percussive crackle. Very spooky, the last thing you would want while listening would be for something… scary… to jump out at you…
… BOO!
I couldn’t resist. Anyway, the first track continues on, becoming a hollow drone that fades into a nothingness void of strange bass frequencies.
The next track is titled ‘Luft I’, and I hear the rapid swell of some horrible alien menace emerge, and swallowed up by it are the screams of… little girls, maybe? It sounds like the kind of screaming you would hear on rollercoasters or fair rides. The frequencies become severe, intense, a sound like having all your teeth drilled out but magnified. Other times, the frequencies would almost suggest that we are falling repeatedly in a very abstract sense, suffering maybe from an anxiety dream brought on by vertigo. A synthetic alien modulation sequence comes in with really nice filtering. As that sound begins to fade it speeds up, becomes like a liquid DNA/RNA goo filling up our ear canals. The artist then plays with a variety of methods of effecting the sequence, getting it to sound very screamy for a bit, and then it turns into kind of a throbbing laser groove, then finally committing to reverb and echo. I feel like I’ve blasted off!
Next is ‘Luft II’. A rapid sequence of electronic sound that comes across audibly as if it were a synthetic bird chirping, complete with what sound like cell-phone interference noises and some high-pitched signal feedback too! There is a lot of white noise permeating the mix, which then gets louder. I like the distorted purity of the high-pitched signal tone. We hear mostly white noise for awhile, then what sounds like someone applying a hammer to a series of nails.
And then? It’s time for some really nice ambient frequency pleasure dome music on ‘Blend’. Deep, lovely ambient chord pads start us off, over which there are some mild lead treatments, and all of this sound seems to be barely contained at the threshold of a cassette tapes hz limit. Very pretty and sweet, but definitely also somewhat abstract.
‘Gaze’ rumbles out at us a little with some very low frequencies. Then, airy pads, cavernous laser blasts and spring-echo footsteps meet us in the latter half of this minute-and-a-half track.
This is definitely a solid recording of abstract, concrète tape noise, lofi frequency porn and synthesis / effect experimentation. If it has piqued your curiosity, be sure to check it out at the link ahead:
Yeah I Know It Sucks 