I think most people do recognize the name of David Cronenberg for his (horror) movie The Fly, or films like A History Of Violence, eXistenZ, Naked Lunch or Eastern Promises. And I know that this site deals with reviews about Aural Art and not motion pictures or any other form of (visual) artistics, but I have to admit that this Canadian film director and screenwriter is one of my personal favourites. This guy, however, deserved / deserves a certain cult-status, for he made and created many (short) movies and movies that may not be that widely known, yet which are highly appreciated within a certain audience. Themes like claustrophobia, sexual fetishes, paranoia, untamed violence, animal lust, dementia, Freudian relationship, futuristic horror, subconscious drifts, technological perversion and dystopian world visions are just a part of the ideas, inspirations and expressions in his oeuvre. He sort of invented the sub-genre ‘body horror’, if you want to. And because of that ‘underdog’-like status, with a small yet very loyal audience, many artists, from different scopes (actors, musicians, painters, screenwriters and composers), are influenced and / or inspired by this semi-legendary Canadian bad boy.
This brings me easily to this compilation; a well-thought collection of (mainly previously unreleased, or exclusively composed) tracks by international sonic artists from all over our mentally sick globe. Ten of them contributed on The Body Of Horror - Music Inspired By The Cinema Of David Cronenberg, another collective by Eighth Tower Records, part of the Unexplained Sounds Group family. It got released digitally, as well as on compact-disc; the latter being a three-folded digipack with subtly-explicit artwork by John Chadwick. Mastering duties were taken care of by label-owner Raffaele Pezzella himself.
Everybody’s a mad scientist, and life is their lab. We’re all trying to experiment to find a way to live, to solve problems, to fend off madness and chaos (David Cronenberg). It explains his uncertainty about being alive (which is different from ‘life’ itself) and the fact that death is the only certainty of our existence.
Since there are no less than ten artists involved on this project-release and because this release is quite ‘old’ in the meantime (although…), I am not going to focus on each single project individually (bio- and discography). This time, I would prefer to stick to the ten ‘songs’ that are gathered under the The Body Of Horror - Music Inspired By The Cinema Of David Cronenberg moniker.
Italy’s Sigillum S open with A Cognitive Island Of Fake Tumor Implants, a harsh work of industrialized Drone, injected with heavy electronics, weird samples (voices and other sources) and psychotic noises. Next come Desiderii Marginis with The Interzone, bringing an ice-cold and ghostly long-stretched Ambient epos, constructed around a vocal sample and filled with additional percussions, sounds and effects. Sonologyst, an outfit by label-owner Raffaele, contribute with Dr. Benway’s Narcotics Operation, which is the lengthiest composition on this sampler with its length of eleven minutes. With a heartbeat as spine, the chemistry of this piece finds out origin in a mixture of mechanical sequences and horrific soundwaves, painting a surreal, supernatural landscape through sonic sculpting. House Of Skin, performed by Mario Lino Stancati, has sort of a dense, semi-Lovecraftian attitude, build around pulsating loops, eldritch undulations and energetic electronica. It’s a truly frightening piece of audible horror, just like the following ‘song’, Metaflesh. The latter, however, created by American act Schloss Tegal, is actually more mechanoid in performance, like an Ambient wall with an atrocious character; the latter strengthened too by the reverberating voices. Dodenskald, hailing from Iran, are represented with Morphogenetical Grafts, starting of like an aural experiment of echoing sequences, then evolving towards an abandoned and isolationist construction, before evolving once more into a concentrated rampart of hypnotizing and, at the very same time, vigorous elegance. ConSec defines destruction and mayhem, for Uncodified (also from Italian soil) offer an amalgam of deadly industrial structures and harsh electronics. The compulsory addition of frenzy elements cover this track with a fetid and toxic audible mud. Next comes Swedish project Jarl with an obscure, mesmerizing piece of transcendental majesty. Dead Zone Visions stands for a gloomy and spectral harmony, deeply melodious in nature, profoundly occult, almost spiritual, in execution, and intoxicating in atmosphere. Cortical Systematics by trans-European outfit Mortar Devotions is the most chimeric, desolate composition on The Body Of Horror … It stands for harmonic Winter Synth / Ambient with a repetitive lead melody and the injection of almost Dungeon Synth-inspired appurtenances, step by step growing into a sooner kinetic symbiosis of electronic frequencies and moony synth-lines. Spanish act Kloob, eventually, perform Hybrid, a macabre and abundant conjunction of elements from cinematic, classical, martial, orchestral and eerie sources. Samples (those vocal ones are truly gruesome), piano and percussions are injected into the intriguing and explorative structures and melodies.
All ‘fans’ of Dark Ambient, Post-Industrial, Drone, Electroacoustics, Ambient Noise Wall and the likes will appreciate this tribute, which one can consider a soundtrack for Cronenberg’s oeuvre rather than a collection of separated songs. There’s a certain experimentalism behind every composition, yet then again there is no pathetic exaggeration involved either.