There is a drifting ship plowing steadily toward a forgotten shore, hull rotted from salt spray and rainbow-sheened with chemicals. The holds are full of the pulsing and hollow screams of the half-dead passengers, screams so insistent that they merge with the waves and form a wall of static only interrupted by the metallic thumps of cargo shifting in the holds. A mad preacher stands lashed to the wheel, steering the hulk towards looming, dark cliffs. The captain and crew huddle below against the hollow booming of his voice, for in the preacher’s sermon they can hear their own doom. As the ship noses forward into a swell, one can see for a moment the words “Shock Frontier” picked out in stark bone-white along its forward bow.
Shock Frontier’s “Mancuerda Confessions” is a chronicle of inevitable destruction, the ship toward the shore, the planet falling into a dying sun. There is a harsh and drifting edge to Robert Kozletski and Kyle Carney’s compositions that is balanced by nettle-fine bursts of electronic brilliance. Cyclical and murmured samples dwell behind and within metallic drones that stretch off into a vanishing point shrouded by darkness.
Murky realms of static drift, rise, and fall against clattering rhythms and wounded shrieks echoing up through a silo of reverb. Shock Frontier treads the fine line between ambient, blackened industrial, and the pulsing noise of early CMI artists. The pulsing stomp of “Paroxysm” and “Mancuerda” are balanced against the hissing melodic brain-death of tracks like “Blood Eagle Zealot” in a manner that engulfs the listener in both structure punishment and drifting, hazy ambience.
With Shock Frontier, Malignant Records adds to it’s already impressive stable of modern sound artists. While maintaining a firm footing in the best traditions of death industrial and ambient drone, Shock Frontier presents their deep-space dirges in such a finely controlled and cinematic manner that “Mancuerda Confessions” has found a deep pocket in my normal listening rotation.
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