“The Night Corridor” is the perfect Hitchcock style
precursor to set oneself up for classic suspense and creepiness, both of which
are so fitting for KNO. Starting with a nightmarish classic silver screen
Hollywood soundtrack intro, that eventually becomes swallowed in buzzing and
gives way into the cyborg arctic electronic atmosphere of “Cleaning Still Houses”,
which is somewhat similar to Antigen Shift, especially The Way of the North and some elements of brakeHEAD such as “biTer”.
“Cleaning Still Houses” is an eerie thumping rhythmic
groove-athon that still avoids dancefloor cliché tendencies and goes for a
sci-fi horror analogue atmosphere, not unlike some Death Factory material, that
really pushes ambient and electronic forward. Expect colossal crashing metallic
clanks and bass pulses like an iceberg falling apart in the middle of the
arctic ocean, on repeat for five minutes, and that’s the intense and chilling
experience that you get from “Cleaning Still Houses”.
“Industrial Pale Ale” is a vaporous seven-and-a-half minutes
of very minimal electronic sculpting that has a darker and more organic feel on
what was done by Wolfgang Voigt in his Gas project. Here one feels as though
they are in an abandoned asylum under a narcotic/anti-psychotic influence, only
a quarter consciously aware of reality and haunted by the clanking of old metal
gurneys and the hollow echoes of wind gusts through the vast empty tattered
corridors. Although the actual sounds on this track were recorded in one of the
Nogne O breweries, some of the best European beers that I’ve had (their stout
has some serious ABV and body which kills most American stouts which lack the
density of a true stout), the atmosphere KNO creates is always a perfect storm
of industrial versus organic and this creation is yet another example of the
skill this duo contains.
“Becoming the Green” continues the vaporous misty fog sounds
of “Industrial Pale Ale”, only to be out stomped by the rhythmic penetrating
“Vulgalina Fever” with it’s infectious and heavy but very metallic crushing
rhythm and whirring like an electric drill amidst some Russian vocal clips
thrown in. Now “Vulgalina Fever” is fully into Deutsch Nepal territory and a
majestic and haunting industrial soundscape is fully realized.
“It’s a Test” fascinates me the most, not just because it’s
really eerie, surreal, and definitely psychotropic, but aside from the
amazingly chilling industrial ambient textures that comprise the song, somewhat
of a Yen Pox/Stahlwerk 9 combination with some slight martial/neoclassical
effect on drumming that echoes in from the battlefield in the distance
underneath the fog. It turns out that there are field recordings on here taken
live at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, reactor 4, in this song, which are
slightly discernable as the dripping and subtle chimes/clanks/beeps in the
background. The song is surreal on it’s own, but reading that puts it in a
whole new realm of thought.
“Astronaut 47” closes the album with a Lustmordish hypnotic
ambient drone that is as much soothing and organic as it is cosmic and
dreamlike.
Five years in the making and VERY cerebral and dreamlike, Overlook Hotel will be a similar
experience to portions of The Shining. Every track is it’s own experience and
the sum of the parts yields an album that gives you a sense of wandering an
endless desert in ones dreams. Available on both CD and vinyl, GET the
vinyl!!!!!!! The vinyl contains the warm fuzzy haze tones that are a necessary
element to this death industrial/dark ambient masterpiece!!! brakeHEAD was
brilliant, but Overlook Hotel eclipses it in comparison.
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