In January 2021, unassuming clubbers looking for a Saturday night out at Taipei’s FINAL might’ve been surprised to encounter Taiwanese drone-doom duo 破地獄 / Scattered Purgatory flooding the room with noise, in what was billed as their last performance. Yet the duo had already been toying with the boundary between the city’s rock and electronic scenes; guitarist Lu Jiachi, who cut his teeth in the stoner rock band Sleaze, dabbled in deconstructed club music throughout the late 2010s, eventually putting out tracks for local labels like JIN, OverMyBody, and Sea Cucumber. Five years after that cacophonous “farewell” show, the band is back with an album that builds on their foundation of Earth-esque guitar-and-bass rumbling, incorporating more bite-sized song structures inflected with trip-hop, jazz, and synth pop.
In their early work, Scattered Purgatory let distorted guitar tones simmer and dissolve into infrasound, occasionally spritzing traditional Chinese woodblock and cymbals on top. Inspired by the same ritualistic mysticism that powers Taiwanese compatriots Mong Tong and Island Futurism, the band would hone its sound in Thian-gi Lok-ian, an improv collective that mined the depths of local musical traditions. At the same time, their songs would get shorter and shorter as they began to incorporate kosmische synths and sequencers: 2017’s Sua-Hiam-Zun, their most recent full-length, was a wash of ambient textures, swirling suona airs, and distant guitar swells.
波地獄 / Post Purgatory is a bold change in direction for a band that made its name on slow-building jams that reached upwards of 20 minutes; the longest tracks here run less than six. “Wunai” is a wink at their turn toward a poppier style, using a phrase meaning “helplessness” commonly used in ’90s C-pop ballads. Yet their sound is as dark as ever, welding hallucinogenic percussion to spoken-word delivery inspired by the 口白 (kháu-pe̍h in Hokkien) of Cold War-era songs by Wen Hsia. Buttressed by jazzy ghost snares from White Wu (Prairie WWWW, Manic Sheep), “Wunai” is a cry into the void: “你咁真正有聽著 / 我心內的 無奈” (“Do you dare hear/The helplessness inside my heart?”), Lu Li-yang mutters, his voice dispersing into an echo.
Although the vocals (in Mandarin, Hokkien, and English) are an impressive testament to Taiwan’s linguistic diversity, some tracks are less successful at tying together the band’s freewheeling ideas. “Thundering Dream” is a less cohesive “L’Ancienne,” with Hokkien vocals drowned out by sputtering electronics and haunting ad-libs; when a gamelan melody forces its way into the mix halfway through, it’s less of a mic drop and more like a punchline. “Moonquake” has an interesting backing track, samples of Nanguan flourishes bursting over a sparse bassline like a Taiwanese “Sa Mo Jung.” Yet the English lyrics by dotzio (I’mdifficult) on “Moonquake” seem to drag on endlessly, more atmosphere than substance: “Following rules, she’s been following patterns/Does this all have a meaning?” The band’s recent one-off with New York’s Dis Fig might have been a better fit here. Other songs meander, struggling to find their footing: “Above the Clouds” opens with a Beiguan accelerando that gives way to a piano riff girded by an omnipresent Sigur Rós-like guitar drone, yet the song loses steam halfway through and ends with an abrupt fade-out.
The old Scattered Purgatory rears its head on ambient interlude “KL20,” which is also the record’s shortest track. With a desolate hum that pans from ear to ear, the track feels like an update of the Chrono Trigger “Ruined World” theme for a present that feels as apocalyptic as ever. The band is at its best when mulling on darkness that feels inescapable; Post Purgatory strains to see the light.
