Recording as Egyptrixx, Toronto's David Psutka helped to define the sound of London's Night Slugs label. His albums Bible Eyes and A/B Til Infinity took techno rhythms, gleaming synth melodies, and noxious ambient atmospheres and spun them into exciting new variants. His new project Ceramic TL represents a break with Egyptrixx's style: The beats are gone and the melodies have run dry; with an emphasis on buzzing drones and detuned bell tones, it's all atmosphere, and it is more noxious than ever, heady as huffing aerosol.
Sign of the Cross Every Mile to the Border is pitched as "seven meditations on optimism and faith through the prism of environmental cataclysm." It's a theme that might bring to mind his former labelmate Jam City's recent album Dream a Garden, which was described by its creator as an attempt to locate beauty and healing in the fight against oppression. But the music couldn't be further away from Jam City's dreamy mood board, with its gauzy echoes of Scritti Politti and Prince and vintage 4AD. Psutka's '80s borrowings are limited to the suffocating cacophony of Glenn Branca's guitar symphonies and the persistent swoosh of digital phaser effects. His fondness for black metal is evident in the charred rumbling of a track like "Life on Earth," in which ringing bells melt together into an unbroken din and a low hum crackles like a burning bass amp. At the track's close, a car revs in the distance and the sound of wind and fire whips across the landscape, bringing the album's environmental themes to the fore.
The opening track, a burnished bell-tone whine, is remarkably similar to the stopped-watch loops of Thomas Brinkmann's What You Hear (Is What You Hear) and it scans as pure texture. The entire album, in fact, is almost entirely devoid of conventional musical or rhythmic events, preferring the static repetition of granular loops stretched to infinity. Ceramic TL—does that "TL" stand for "timeline"?—seems to be a project about taking a time-based medium and squeezing the life out of it, stopping it dead in its tracks and flattening it beyond recognition: music as roadkill, as flatline.
Where the music is austere, the track titles are positively Byzantine. "I Attached To and Pored Over Photos of Places I Loved That Were Reduced to Ash" is one; "I Often Wondered How the Group Would React When Eco-Apocalypse Finally Struck" is another. Some sound like they might be clippings from YA novels ("This Looks Just Like It, the Answer to My Prayers - I Thought My Life Was Over Until Two Years Later I Arrived"), but it's also possible to imagine them, not uncharitably, as Black Metal Cats captions. Of course, black metal itself is no stranger to florid iconography, and the deep purple of Psutka's prose, as faintly ridiculous as it may be, has the effect of doubling down on his theme, practically daring you not to meet the album on its own ambitious terms.
The final track, called simply "Clearing," is a welcome breath of fresh air after the labyrinthine path that has led up to it. Amid a fluttering of birdsong, an automobile's open-door chime beeps, the door slams, and a metallic chop of rotors, indicating sudden liftoff, flashes back to the zap and chug of Egyptrixx. Whether or not it suggests a return in the future to his more club-oriented work, who knows. But it makes a fitting finish for Ceramic TL's claustrophobic audio play, in which sound itself is dramatized as a life-or-death struggle for oxygen. And, at long last, Psutka's bet on "optimism and faith" pays off.
