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CD Feature/ R.Y.N.: "Whistle and I'll Come to You"

  Tobias

This is a disturbing record. It all starts with the fact that it’s next to impossible finding any useful information on the musicians behind R.Y.N. What we do know is that Pete Burn usually forms one part of distortion-death-drone quartet Marzuraan, a band with a passion for  “Do it Yourself” aestetics and the beauty of bonecrushing noise. For R.Y.N., he has shed guitar, bass and drums and teamed up with a certain D. Glaister, turning a couple of field recordings into two ghostly miniatures beyond the confinements of human vision and perception by the sole and ample use of delay. The result is incomparable, inexplicably impressive and unsettling.

Imagine the following situation: You’re off into dreamland in the middle of the day, when your colleague in the office suddenly asks you something. In the blink of an eye. there is a moment of total detachment, a separation from both your state of illusion and the physical world, in which your mind tries to orientate itself and the body attempts to recover its senses. In this pretty ordinary example, you would hardly notice this infinitesimaly short process, instead turning your attention to whatever question is being posed. But stretched to a discernible length, a vast rockscape opens up, tightly packed clouds of grey palpitations flood into unspeakable void spaces without frontiers, without beginning and end. That is where “Whistle and I’ll come to you” is taking you: Swathes of fog float over a silent meadow while skinny candyfloss arms reach out for you like tentacles. Shimmering light bulbs send warm rays of light, while the sound of a giant vacuum cleaner and a brush beating against metal chains pierce the all-encompassing emptyness. Everything melts into a unimorph hum, a motionless mass of pulsating nothingness, which inhales and expands in an endless cycle, before disappearing from hearing. The flipside, “A Warning to the Curious” is just as evanescent, electrifying and frighteningly ethereal. Sharper, more abrasive and more direct, yet at the same time equally bewieldering and lost in evil reveries, this comes close to a deserted milling plant in the jungle operating on its own. There is nothing but the incessant and merciless mechanical ruction of the machine, a drone which puts the body into an immediate state of alert. At the end, the noise fades away and some footsteps are heard, even though it remains unknown, who has entered the scene and what for.

Which, of course, is part of the point. We have become so accustomed to accepting only melody and harmony as the basic building blocks of composition, that a music as far away from them as possible must seem both fascinating and frightening. Should there be a theme to “Whistle”, then it has everything to do with the firm belief that unravelling the mystery means spoiling the pleasure. If you like this record, you will go over it again and again just to find out why. And if you hate it, you will still keep coming back just to find out what it is that’s so intriguing about it. As we mentioned earlier: Quite disturbing, really.

By Tobias Fischer

Homepage: Drone Records
Homepage: Marzuraan at Myspace