Available on: Exotic Pylon LP
The dialogue between dance and noise is thriving these days but, as John Cohen would no doubt attest, it hasn’t always been thus. Back in 2010, he and fellow Brighton resident Barry Prendergast made a splash with Corrupt My Examiner – an LP of raucous rhythmic noise that seemed to take the baton from industrial dubsteppers Vex’d and ferry it to the very edge of the abyss. Drawing on 8-bit’s cartoonish digitality and the surgical abrasiveness of Pan Sonic, the pair found a way of amping up dubstep’s latent aggression without recourse to the usual chainsaw basslines. But they – operating under the name Dead Fader – remained a distinctly niche concern.
These days it’s just Cohen, now Berlin-based, at the controls, and recent EPs under the alias – while excellent – have served to highlight just how tightly focussed the Dead Fader aesthetic is. Perhaps Cohen’s return to his own name with Deaf Arena reflects a desire for a more varied diet. This LP, for Jonny Mugwump’s Exotic Pylon label, follows in the footsteps of a series of ambient-leaning birth-name efforts; most notably 2008’s Noise Pollution, which counterbalanced Dead Fader’s aggression with a sort of towering, stately poignancy.
That’s not to say that DF fans won’t find anything familiar here. ‘Watch That Searing Flare’ is propelled forward by a characteristically ear-scraping electro beat, while the first half of ‘Sweet Tester’ is pummelling hip-hop-noise, its squealing percussion seeming to writhe in plasticised agony over lumbering haymakers of sub-bass. But for the most part Cohen turns his pressure-cooked sound-palette to more introverted ends. The excellent ‘Human Distortion’ could be a lost early ’90s IDM gem were it not for the white-hot distortion coating its surface. ‘Promises’’ oceanic chord-ripples seem to be crumbling under their own weight, a la Basinski’s Disintegration Loops, and closer ‘This Place 2’, with its muffled elegiac piano and single vacant drone, is almost Caretaker-esque.
Deaf Arena’s weaker moments come when Cohen experiments with a portentous tone borrowed from doom metal, or perhaps post-rock. The title track redeems itself somewhat by lurching into the usual gurning beat-noise in the latter half, but opener ‘The Deep’, with its monk-like chanting and throbbing guitar chords, feels a little heavy-handed. Better is ‘Long And Narrow’, which occupies similar territory but ventures deeper into the gloaming, resulting in a kind of sub-heavy doom-drone reminiscent of a subterranean Raime. In fact, this record frequently invites comparisons with contemporary esotericists – The Haxan Cloak’s gothic angst and Roly Porter’s grandiose dark ambient are both close cousins. But Deaf Arena doesn’t feel like a concerted leap for the bandwagon so much as a careful extension of Cohen’s already well-established idiom. Placed in a broader expressive context, the noise-terror tendencies of Dead Fader become, if anything, even more arresting.
