Look at the noose that graces the cover of this album. It reaches out from shadows unknown, waiting for our unexpecting head to slide into it unaware so it can then tighten and yank us back into the tenebrae of horror it emerged from. This is what Bobby Krlic aka The Haxan Cloak has planned for anyone daring to dive into his music. Krlic is not only a musician, he is a true sound sculptor. An exponent of a small, rare and exclusive breed of musicians that have taken the act of creating sound to the next level, to a place of enormous imaginative force. Krlic is not one that only creates but that also molds, subdues and transforms. In the realm of atmospheric and experimental electronic music, his grip on concepts like form, structure and execution is flawless and relentless and he is only at the stage of album number two, which makes his incumbent presence on the forefront of dark ambient, noise and industrial electronic music downright fucking scary. But when this guy decides that the time and place is right to create worlds just from sound, his output and execution become then an unstoppable force of creation.
Having abundantly evolved from – and gone past – the blackened noise realm of things of his staggering self-titled debut, his follow up work, “Excavation”, shows the evolution and artistic maturity of a genius. “Excavation” is a completely new and different affair than its precedessor and an opus so steeped with depth and greatness that at times its sheer mass and towering presence seems almost overbearing. There are worlds that open up in front us during the fruition of this wicked album. Enourmous “things” that swirl, morph and breathe right before us, which are there, menacing and threatening but almost impossible to grasp on or pin down. Once you hit play on this album, it literally feels like something has decided to come to life in the room, and believe me, not only is this evocative force a rare occurance even within the greatest atmospheric albums, but it is also one hell of a creepy feeling to have. Krlic’s industrial/dark ambient ordeal is for real. It is a place where the mind gets lost, wandering into a maze of frightful angst and total absurdity populated by all sorts of ungraspable but frightening presences that lurk in the shadows of our imagination and subconscious. The sound literally slithers and morphs, then aggregates in giant clusters of tentacled nonsense only to then re-rupture once again in giant storms of swarming hisses and blistering whispers. The music is a constant flow of emotional collapse. The composition is so bright and concise that Krlic is able to convey an incredible amount of depth and structure into tiny spaces and in incredibly short instances. And all this amazing power that the composition and songwriting displays materializes with incredible and imaginative force. This music pushes its way through our emotions in an unstoppable way and is able to tunnel through our brain with extreme ease almost like a degenerative disease that there is no stopping. At times even our common language or conceptual understanding of the real world seem completely inadequate to describe or even identify Krlic’s sonic vision. One thing is for sure though, that this man is only at the beginning of his artistic career and has already managed to create worlds that most musicians can not even dream of achieving in a lifetime. Let this man haunt you, it will be worth every single horrified heartbeat.
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