Surfaces are never harder or more unforgiving than in January and February. Cold pushes up against you; your clothes become defensive. So do you: ducked down, trapped in your own head. I've wondered over the past weeks if Audionom's Retrospektiv feels as it does because of how much it resembles natural elements boring in and reflecting blankly back. I'm wondering, and yet I don't want to know; records should never be able to tell us that much about ourselves.
Kemado, Audionom's label, revels in a kind of hard originlessness. With two releases last year (The Sword's Age of Winters and the Invaders compilation) Kemado made themselves synonymous with hipster-metal, a genre basically defined by the bands' lack of connection with the scene to which their music alludes. Their gallery-rock outfit Lansing-Dreiden make deadpan, nonspecifically evocative songs which they then hand off to anonymous musicians to perform. They import Swedes, drag Brooklyn artists out of the woodwork.
Audionom, a Swedish art collective that includes filmmaker Martin Malm as a member, is the label's iciest output yet; the band's New Neu! Order cuts diamond hard. Like a less rhythmically inhibited Joy Division, Audionom's preferred motion is pure android march, all choppily deliberate guitar and obviously synthetic synthesizer yowl. They'd be Refused if they enjoyed themselves more, and necrotic if they enjoyed themselves less. Their rallying cries-- "Kristall"'s robotic "Tonight, tonight, we come to your town," intoned again and again-- sound like threats.
The Joy Div stuff is so bloodless as to be vampiric: "And You Said I Was The Only One" is Curtis and Sumner without the epilepsy and the depth of bad feeling; "Kein Bock" could be "New Dawn Fades" with all of the cavernous space filled in. It's an uneasy revival-- their resurrections only feel more lifeless. Audionom is a haunted band in these spots, and less interesting for it. Better that they haunt, which they otherwise do, making music reflective enough to see yourself in.
"Ljusets Krigare" uses simple counterpoints and layers them to the point of madness, guitars ripping in and out at all levels of the mix, the pace picking up to stab and falling back to mutter and bleed. More uneasy is "Spindlar", which buzzes grating synth jabs and intermittent, junked-out guitar jangles that drop out without warning to leave spiky keyboards gnawing at your ear.
Malm, the film artist who performs with them, is a telling presence. Audionom makes sound that arrests when it's on and is almost impossible to recall when it's not. Like any other abstract painting or image, the elements are rigorously composed, but only in regard to one another. The band, like many of us, is locked in its own space, across a distance that can seem impossible to cross. That's the rub though: four musicians' collective subjectivity, reaching you in yours.
