Candor Chasma - Rings

In Richard Stanley's superb 1993 film, Dust Devil, there is one scene which stands out above all the rest: an airborne shot of a car driving off into the distance from a town surrounded by nothing but desert. You can see the encroaching sands slowly erasing man's incursion, drifting lazily across the scorched black top. This would appear to most to be an establishing visual but to me it signaled that the main character of this picture had already chosen his victim. Italy's Candor Chasma do much the same thing as that inescapable desert, they move quietly and don't make their presence known to any except those who are capable of discerning the message contained in their sound. Brazenly, with a deliberate fixation upon the mind, these two Italians are driven to expound upon it's incalculable range. I cannot discern where the seams are in any of these five tracks and I don't think I'd really want to. No, I don't mean where one ends and the next begins, I'm alluding to the auditory texture which is sinuously woven out of the empty air itself.

The slow throbs of wailing electronics, the measured tension of the voices, the disturbingly cruel reliance upon near immolation to drive the point home. 'Rings' is a voyage into the inferno itself, the fiery cataclysm of what our thoughts would unleash upon this world if only they could. The process of extreme viral amplification is another blade in their deliciously weathered collection of searing weaponry. Make no mistake, Candor Chasma are perfectly named. They do not propose anything else except an opening of rifts in the psychological field of perception; bluntly stated, listening to this record has the same effect watching a spider construct it's web does. At first the framework appears, then come the connective silvery lines and lastly, the architect moves out of sight in order to lie in wait. You know very well what's going to happen, but you don't question it because this is how it has always been. 'Rings' is a predatory clutch of resilient awareness which won't allow you to listen to anyone else that doesn't share it's intentions.

Believe me, I know.

Since receiving this record last week, I have been unable to play much of anything else because Candor Chasma have been telling me their tale. They have been more than gracious in permitting me some sleep between airings (the resultant dreams have been nightmarishly fascinating). This is one of those records which follows you around whenever you play it, sometimes right in your ears and at other points it lies back and stretches out it's continually morphing skeleton to allow you some insight into it's design. Breaking the conventions of drone appears to be one of this band's objectives and they pull it off magnificently. All these years later, who could imagine that Coil's 'Constant Shallowness Leads to Evil' would have a sibling; don't get agitated by this comparison, play them side by side. Immerse yourself in the Tunnel of Goats and then dive deeper into "Apophenia". You see, they are not as dissimilar as you'd have thought. While Coil became something of a malevolent specter of palpable deconstruction on their half, Candor Chasma take a far more eerie tone with theirs.

You are the last person on Earth, but somehow you know you are not alone. The magnetic remembrances of cities, people, countries and civilization all run through this release like dark red arterial blood. There is no oxygen contained yet somehow life is sustained by it. Clings to it. Dies from it. A diorama of perversely opposite ends, 'Rings' is a harrowing contemplation on the malaise we carry in our very bones. Mar 09 2012