Chaos as Shelter

Here are two full CDs of experimental music at its most experimental. With few vocals to help us out, we are urged to put all the pieces together ourselves and complete the puzzle. Sure, at times this kind of material is just noise and sound for the sake of noise and sound, but with songs titles like "Sandstorm in Heaven," "Amen" and "Jesus the Swordfish," I'm guessing there is a specific agenda here. There is a definite spiritual feel to the songs, but with few vocal cues I must say that I kind of missed the proverbial ark on this one. Either I'm just not up to date on my Christian folklore or I'm reading way too much into this, but two discs are a little much to sit through. The songs are, at times, very sparse and quiet, making you feel as if you were standing at the end of some long, dank pipe with every drip and drop resonating for miles, or you're in the middle of some foreign land unlike anything you've seen with not another soul around. Other moments are more "musical," in the traditional sense, with clearer instrumentation. A lot of it is in fact quite beautiful, but it inches closer and closer to redundancy as the discs proceed. There are times when some vocals, or even some Dead Can Dance-ish wailings, would be in order. You just keep waiting for something more to happen, but it all stays on the same even plateau for the most part.