- Those of us caught up in the current interface between techno and noise were perhaps expecting The Hollow Organ to increase or, at the very least, maintain the level of beat-based experimentation Luke Younger displayed on his two previous titles for PAN. Granted, neither was overrun with groove. Yet each featured vital excursions. "Liskojen Yö," off the Impossible Symmetry LP, lurched along with Zoviet France-style percussion blown-out for 21st-century ears. The title track to last year's Silencer EP, meanwhile, was a brittle chunk of pagan tribalism that had Fonal Records written all over it.
But on The Hollow Organ the veteran noise-head subverts expectations by excising nearly any trace of rhythm. EP opener "Carrier" might be moored to a submerged throb, but it's a throb that surrenders to manic, marimba-like pitter-patter and malfunctioning oscillation screech. Even more telling are "Analogues" and "Spiteful Jester," both of which are marriages of muddied (yet well-layered) electro-acoustics and feedback, and negative space drawn from early '90s Japanese noise. The 10-minute title track is Younger at his most meticulous. By the halfway mark, after a thick wave of metallic resonance plateaus, his sound collage and artificial field recordings conjure a vision of a rusty freighter swaying on a cold, black sea. On board is a pooch (one that gives a single, sharp yelp), and somebody (Younger?) hammering away on a massive pipe organ. The tune he plays feels awfully lonely.
TracklistA1 Carrier
A2 Analogues
B1 Spiteful Jester
B2 The Hollow Organ