Beyond Sensory Experience - Faint

A lot of bands attempted to describe a color of sorrow and loss many times before, but the outcome was not always that successful, though dull and boring sometimes. Here is one of the options brought to the listeners by Jonas Aneheim and K. Meizter which take us on a journey with their project "Beyond Sensory Experience". I am pretty sure that BSE are well known to all of you creating the finest dark ambient music for more than ten years already, first via Old Europa Cafe label and then through Cold Meat Industry. After the death of Cold Meat, the guys found a new home on a hospitable Canadian Cyclic Law, where they released their second album already.

With the latest album called "Faint" BSE decides to impugn the whole perception of how dark the music can be. Eleven tracks are charged and ready to freeze all my senses starting with "Bystanders", a slow, a little bit delusive, but still very emotional composition. Somnolent melody rolls forward, painting the world in grey and black gamut, raising shadows from each corner of my room. Those shadows continue to play with minimalistic tunes through the next track "Respect" and from this point the listener steps into the kingdom of melancholy where it rules with unlimited power.

The idea of the wonderful track "Yearning" is based on the poem "Letter to Onegin" by Alexander Pushkin which is considered to be one of the greatest poems about desperate love of woman towards man that was ever written. The composition is based on a slow pizzicato guided by a woman declamation of those strongest words and I find it very convincing in its structure full of spirit of eternal suffering. The words rise from the times when feelings were admired, when people desired to feel deeply, emotionally, without concerns.

"...But you, keeping for my unhappy lot
Even one drop of sympathy
Will not entirely abandon me..." (A. Pushkin)

The same mood migrates into "Blank" with a slow piano session crying for the broken heart; sorrowful and dark, dark as the longest night of the year, when it seems that nothing can warm up the senses again.

With "Sleepwalking" the music becomes a little bit lighter and dreamier, crossing the thin border between dark ambient and drone ambient genres. Hypnotizing droning guitar loop drifts forward, seasoned with sounds of field recordings and gentle background chat. "Legacy" returns with melancholic minimalism, but paints it with even darker colors. The melancholy is on the level of desperation and darkest depression already; when there is no blink of hope, not even a single sign of it remaining somehow out there. "Stale" continues with a piano session that creates a thick atmosphere of a true sadness with a heavy wave of fear while the whole world is covered with ashes of burned love.

The following composition "Stumble" turns on some lights and shows kind of a recovery, but the heart is still cold, frozen are all senses after the long winter of emotions. The concentration on piano loops is felt here even more, slow percussion adds some rhythm to the whole structure, but it is not for waking up the music there, but to inject more drama into it. The same technique is used in "Exhausted" where the rhythm guides a slow drift of the main melody towards the eternity and beyond.

In "Astray" the music finally reaches the point when it becomes a total drone ambient; the melody is being driven by the deep piano effect (again) towards the heavy meditative drift.

To conclude a so-called "beyond sensory experience", "Faint" is the strongest and most honest album from these Sweden residents for my taste so far. It could seem too monotonous in some of its parts (I felt that 10 minutes is too much for "Astray"), but the meditative effect compensates those small failures. Also, the album structure is not solid enough imho, tearing a few tracks out of it. Maybe their re-positioning could have helped, but anyway if listened out of the context, they are beautiful and bring a fine ambience by all means. Special thanks go to the band for the tandem of "Yearning" + "Blank", a true delight of the whole record. Get yourself the copy of this darkness and sorrow before it goes out of print. Only 500 copies are available from Cyclic Law.

P.S. I felt some disconnection from the images of the albums' cover. In my opinion, it doesn't reflect the core of the record that much. But anyhow, it is for the band to decide after all.
Apr 19 2014