Kites - Hallucination Guillotine // Final Worship (Load)
5/5
By: Charlie Potter
In seven words, heavy going, intensely monged out, squelchy noise.
In eight hundred and thirty six words...
I recently fell asleep on the sofa under a blanket with Hallucination Guillotine // Final Worship on in a low lit room, and it was a truly amazing experience. There's something intensely hypnotic about it, and I apologise for just how many times I use the words intense and hypnotic as I understand that in some contexts they could have approximately the same meaning, but approximate just won't do here. This is first of all INTENSE, and secondly, HYPNOTIC.
The most exciting point comes with the beginning of 'Glitter Raider In The Hall of Triumph', the second track on this fine record. It's exciting for two big reasons, the first being that it sounds completely different to the first track. With a lot of noise albums, you can realistically just expect to strap yourself in and have your ears unrelentingly blown out for the duration, whereas Hallucination Guillotine... is more like an experimentation regarding the dynamics of sound.
Yet I don't mean to undermine the amount of consideration that has gone into the unusual arrangements in places, which brings me nicely to the second thing that's so great about track two here - it starts with all this weird squelchy noise being masterfully pulled about the place, something not unique to Kites, but the frequencies of the sound seem to change from wide to thin, loud and quiet, left and right, near and far, and as if that wasn't enough you have a lunatic presumably behind this delicately crafted organism whispering sweet nothings of pure insanity over the top, or more appropriately underneath. Right from the get go you have the lines "tonight we're cleaning the house - I'm going to reach for the silver switch". This is a truly exciting thing for me, as by this point my mind is firing off on a thousand directions. This is weird underground culture doing what it is supposed to do. It's supposed to make you feel something that you have never felt before, display a carefully crafted particular aesthetic that you can only interpret in a very personal manner, one that makes you feel somehow liberated from not having felt that way before, that makes you feel freed from the shackles of having to negotiate boring objects that always adhere to the same rules. This is just one of the reasons that weird is OK. and particularly, abstract is OK.
And it's not just the music and the lyrics, it's the artwork, the titles, even the guys' PO Box address is interesting and weird, every inch of this artwork is perfect and only adds another dimension to the whole package. The artwork being your first point of contact with the thing should get you pretty excited from the start, and I would go as far as saying that Hallucination Guillotine // Final Worship is a good example of how an album's artwork can have a positive effect on the music. The whole issue reminds me of when one of my primary school teachers complained that she preferred Winnie The Pooh before she saw the illustrations because she could make up her own picture in her head. This is of course dependant on the artist, I happen to think that the Ernest H.Shepard illustrations in the Winnie The Pooh books are much better than my primary school teachers lousy imagination, but more importantly I think that the illustrations are probably better than what I would have imagined. And I think that this album / piece of art / whatever you want to think of it as is better for having art work that suggests a certain sort of aesthetic, an aesthetic that I wouldn't have got to on my own, a better aesthetic than the vague ill considered imagery I might have associated with these sounds.
Between the completeness of the package and the variation exhibited in these tracks, this is indeed a fantastic exercise in the use of context. There is a point in Hallucination Guillotine, the first half of this album, in which you are exposed to a whole bunch of high pitched derangement, and instead of thinking 'here we go...' like we might usually do, you think 'wow, that is pretty exciting, that there would high pitched noise here...' and conclude that there's a lot of the beauty to be found in the way this album presents things to you.
If someone told me that this music was made by aliens from another planet I would think that although that's very unlikely, if aliens do indeed make music this might well be what it sounds like. And I'd think that aliens are prit-tey weird. Yes, if anything Hallucunation Guillotine // Final Worship is not quite dynamic enough in places, defaulting back to a crunchy, blasting drench of hypno-spiral sound, but you could easily argue that these bits at least serve a perfect purpose when taken in context. As one of the most considered noise recordings I've ever heard, it's an all round incredible piece of art.
Download a legal MP3 of 'Final Worship' from 'Hallucination Guillotine // Final Worship' HERE.
Artists in this article: Kites
Your Feedback
Login to post your comment