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Black To Comm
It has been quite a long wait since the last proper Black To Comm album (2009's wonderful Alphabet 1968), so it was an absolute delight to have Marc Richter unexpectedly re-surface in December with an inspired return to form (and one of the year’s finest and most singular albums).  While this latest release understandably bears almost no resemblance to Marc’s decidedly outré soundtrack for EARTH (2012), it also does not seem to follow any obvious, linear progression from his previous work either. Black To Comm is its own self-contained, anomalous world of vibrant, hallucinatory sound art brilliance, resembling nothing less than the beautiful nexus where drone, space rock, psychedelia, and the flickering unreality of late-night semi-consciousness meet.
Richter does not waste any time at all in wrong-footing any listeners expecting a traditional drone album with this effort, as the beautifully woozy, shimmering, and squiggly synths of "Human Ghidrah" are relegated to the background by a bizarre (and impassioned) metaphysical spoken word performance that resembles late-night TV televangelism.  The speaker is definitely not a televangelist though, as a televangelist would never urge me to grab my own anus and pull myself inside-out like this guy does.  While no other pieces feature spoken-word other than the similarly unhinged closer ("Them"), "Human Ghidrah" sets an ambitiously unpredictable tone for the album that Richter does not waver from.  Also, the spoken-word bits are an admirably bold move on Richter’s part, as he deflects the focus from some rather beautiful underlying music, opting to embrace the weird and unexpected rather than settling for just an excellent drone piece.
None of the eight pieces spanning Black To Comm share much in common in any specific sense, but they all display a similarly original vision and similarly ingenious construction.  The most instantly gratifying and accessible highlight is the effortlessly epic and haunting "Hands," which is probably the compositional high-water mark of Richter's career: its garbled and processed vocal melody, elegiac piano chords, swooping synthesizers, and surreal array of peripheral sounds seem to condense the beginning and end of an entire world into just under 5 minutes.  While nothing else on the album quite rivals that spectacular achievement, a few pieces come quite close.  For example, the 20-minute "Is Nowhere" is an absolute monster of a drone piece, effectively enhancing its fragile, haunting central motif with field recordings before bulldozing it all with some wonderfully harsh, gnarled synthesizers.  The aforementioned "Them" is yet another highlight, achieving nearly 15 minutes of sputtering, hallucinatory, and otherworldly grandeur before its deeply strange vocal catharsis erupts.
The remaining four pieces are similarly interesting and enjoyable, despite being somewhat less audacious in scope.  "Spectre Teeth," for example, is a buzzing, Middle Eastern-tinged drone piece featuring still more eerily tweaked vocals, while the heavy, engulfing thrum and exotic vocals of "1975" sound like the crescendo of an especially deranged and ambitious prog album.  Later, "Fackeln in Sturm" unfolds a subtly lysergic array of shimmers, swells, and warped vocals over an echoey krautrock-meets-dub groove.  Not to be left out, the remaining "Spiralen Der Errinerung" is possibly more bizarre than anything else on the album, resembling nothing less than some kind of ancient and deeply hallucinatory religious ceremony half-heard through heavy metallic grinding and something that sounds like heavily amplified Tibetan throat-singing.
At the risk of sounding somewhat hyperbolic, Black To Comm truly is a staggering and singular achievement and it is one that only could have come from Marc Richter: there are so many bewildering artistic choices, odd juxtapositions, eclectic influences, and disparate threads on display here that it is a marvel that it all works so well and feels so perversely natural.  I was also struck by how disorientingly timeless the album feels.  While the technology, techniques, and some of the influences certainly come from Earth (the planet) circa 2014, the music somehow always sounds completely unstuck in both time and place, seamlessly evoking at various points a lonely organist in an empty church, snatches of particularly weird half-remembered dreams, ancient cults, or something completely otherworldly altogether (and all while never lapsing into anything remotely mundane, derivative, or easily recognizable).  I truly cannot say enough good things about this album, as Richter has delivered a legitimate, unqualified, start-to-finish masterpiece.  This was my personal favorite release of 2014 by a landslide.
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