Lull | Origami Arktika - Brook flac album

It wasn't until I began listening to this in the background that I remembered just how creepy LULL could sound. It's been some years since I encountered anything by them and it's strange how an atmosphere can take you back in time. The first two pieces, with MICK HARRIS's solo LULL venture, leaves you with mixed feelings. Firstly, when it is good, when it takes the pleasant comfort of familiar home life away and replaces it instead with something disturbing, it can be awesome. There again, sometimes you feel you can percieve what is happening behind the scenes and then it can be a little pedestrian. The fact that MICK got into what he termed 'Radiator Music' where it literally is the ambient sounds of a domestic environment, somehow makes you more perceptive to certain tricks behind the mix. But then LULL has never been a wholy electronic project, with even "Dreamt About Dreaming" having root sounds from coins being rolled around metal bowls and so on. And there's nothing whatsoever wrong with using loops and samples from around your own environment - many other artists do so, and many of the results aren't nearly as good as this. The first track seems to use a variety of boiler sounds - the pitch rising and falling while water heats, cools, expands and contracts. Of course the raw noise is somewhat processed, but still retains evidence of it's core source. The second track, however, is a much more complex work and hides it's secrets well. There's pitch-shifting and what sounds to me like cut-ups played at random, sometimes rapid and confused; sometimes languid and graceful. The first and last collaboratives track between LULL and ORIGAMI ARKTIKA is a slightly different affair. It could be compared most closely with the other recent HARRIS release "Dys" with the group AMBRE. In short it's an abstract, structureless working which uses a naive sound pallate which somehow increases the atmospheric resonance to make the listener feel disturbed, as if they have entered an environment not bizarre enough to be entirely 'alien', yet too weird to be comfortably human. Remember the scene in Texas Chainsaw Massacre when the girl runs into the room full of bones, feathers and skin furniture? Imagine sobering up on something like that 'armchair', reality creeping in so not all warning bells go off at once? This might be the soundtrack to accompany that awakening - a combination of unco-ordinated childishness and a deep, dark dread. The live atmosphere adds a certain cold pall to the otherwise cloying warmth. The remaining pieces are more like earlier LULL - dark, chilling driftworks which stir the ground-mists slowly in some arcane Hades. If this is ambient sound, then only the hardier soul would survive the atmosphere. Dark clouds of indiscernable noise blend with the distant whine of factories in a Stygian Place Of Lost Souls, with a bare few human references. Again a distinctively atmospheric album, which hangs in the air like poisonous smoke. Rich with delicate detail and worthy of continuous exploration. I cannot tell where one artist leaves off and another takes over (with possible exception of tracks 3 & 7 which have been recorded in a real space rather than entirely through a mixing desk), but ORIGAMI ARKTIKA certainly sound worth seeking out, and LULL, as always, deliver the goods. Originally reviewed for Metamorphic Journeyman.