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Pure Ground, "Crawling Through/Evaporation"
Even before Prurient's foray into actual electronic music on Bermuda Drain, there was a nascent trend in the noise scene embracing synth pop and early electro sounds in a raw, underground sort of approach. One of the leaders of this charge was Greh Holger (Hive Mind), whose Chondritic Sound label has made a slow transition from harsh noise to minimal wave in the past few years. Here, paired with Brotman and Short's Jesse Short, he presents two rough-hewn throwbacks to the early '80s new wave scene, in the best possible way.
"Crawling Through" is the more uptempo of the two songs, largely based around a hollow TR-606 kick drum and lead synth sequences that have just the right amount of distortion and noise surrounding them.It follows the standard minimal wave blueprint, but throws just enough noise and dissonance to provide its own identity.On the flip side, the slower, more desperate "Evaporation" slowly trudges along at a snail’s pace, getting to that tenuous level of gothic synth cliché to where it is still enjoyable and endearing, and does not become overwrought or trite.
I immediately felt some traces of Geography-era Front 242, both from the archaic instrumentation (which was then state of the art, of course), and also Holger’s detached, reverberated vocals that are perfectly monochromatic for this project.The two songs may be somewhat simple in their construction, but the structure and the sound of them just grab me in a way that many projects of this ilk fail to do.With their minimal approach that yields catchy rhythms and melodies, it has been a single I have come back to many times since first hearing it.
