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Reformed Faction, "The War Against..."
As members of Zoviet France, Mark Spybey and Robin Storey helped expand ambient music from new-age window dressing to something more dark and compelling. Starting almost 29 years ago, they were among the first artists to fuse the caustic sounds and spartan imagery of Industrial Music with dreamy atmospherics and indigenous insturmentation. This album, their second as Reformed Faction, encompasses the varied sounds and techniques in its members' formidable back catalogue.
Spybey and Storey are masters of low-key menace. Many of the striking tracks on The War Against… exude a distant and concealed hostility that's echoed by the album's deliberately incomplete title. On "Silver Fuse," back-masked voices babble and stutter like corrupted surveillance tapes, echoing the Cold War aesthetics of Zoviet France. Throughout the album, Spybey and Storey demonstrate their talents as vocal manipulators. "The hostile powers have left us" uses soft tremolo to break up medieval plainchant into a pearly fog. Moans and heavy gasps hover above wisps of static and roiling percussion in "The rotted stick that screeches lying."
The mood of this album isn't uniformly dour. The title track is a gentle beatscape flavored with vocoder and choral synths. Short loops of Chinese and Indian folk music lighten the atmosphere between the darker, more expansive pieces. Yet many of the transitions are awkward and not immediately logical. Listening to the album feels like having five records playing in a random mix. Almost every track could be considered ambient music, but abrupt changes in mood disrupt passive listening. A plaintive violin loop suddenly skips and dissolves, the deep resonance of a pounding drum taking its place. Chimes and bells break into concussive slaps and hiccupping voices.
The schizophrenic structuring of The War Against… took a while to get used to. Not only did I have to overcome my initial confusion, but also my desire for a concrete narrative to attach to the music. I needed to actually listen instead of searching for some poorly hidden theme or asking some presupposed question about the artists' intent. My expectations only detracted from the experience of appreciating it intuitively.
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