reviews:
Muhmur:
Have just spent a pleasant while listening to the latest album release by Berlin based project Human Larvae. "Womb Worship" has just been released on CD format by L.White Records. I have a feeling that the album is a "bit of a" classic of its genre....what e'er that may be? Power Electronics, Dark Ambient Noise, Black Metal? It's like hearing a classic by Brighter Death Now or Genocide Organ. Not in sound but in ... hang on a minute here this is bloody good!
"Womb Worship" is a concept album. Eight songs that bleed in to each other over 43 and a bit minutes. It needs to be played loud - it has been mastered that way by James Plotkin. (There's a name from the 90's). It beggars the question; Does your worst nightmare need a soundtrack?
"Perdition From The Virgins Mouth" opens the album with a dramatic one chord piano loop and the onset of thunder clouds. Ominous. The track has a great full sound, three hundred and sixty degrees of sound, a room is full of interference before the vocals start. Shouting guttural vocals through echo device, this kind of vocal is not a favourite...found a lot in Black Metal circles and Harsh Noise. Here (on this album) the vocal treatment blends with the music so it's not all consuming or over powering. I get the "gist" but can't tell what the bloody hell is being communicated. A breath loop leads in to "The Truth I Failed To See" a superb contrast of spiralling uncertainty and spoken word. "Slave To Violence" is blistering sonics with scraped metal and rattling chains. I was fortunate to witness Human Larvae's UK live debut in Exeter earlier this year and saw how Human Larvae create this great sound of bowing an iron rod over the rim of a metal box, through contact mic's, ambient mic's and effects pedals to create an ungodly sound. Beautiful. (I have the iron rod here with me. I keep it next to my CD collection like a rock geek who salivates over owning Jimmy Page's plectrum). "Entwined In The Umbilical Noose" has a great bass vibration building some kind of perimeter before a sonic battle begins ending in a multi-layered cacophonous symphony and stripping down to an assuring and calming four note bass line...."Methods Of Possession" is more vocals with junk metal and more of an introduction to "Wrapped In The Warm Sheets Of Mother Love" and its spinning wheel of blistering noise and spoken word (tape / sample). The story of matricide? This track plays like old school industrial. To an old TG / SPK head like me it is simply brilliant.
"Obsession Intermezzo 2" is the calm before the storm with synthetic strings and wet flesh. The album ends with the title track "Womb Worship". A wall of noise with split stereo vocal treatment, clanking metal and sonic depth charges. The album ends abruptly and all of a sudden...no fade, no come down - like suddenly awakening. Classic.
If you like Power Electronics, cleverly constructed sonic walls of layered madness (think Grunt, Burial Hex and Soldnergeist here) then you need to hear this album. Packaged in an 6 inch CD wallet and great black and white photography - the cover being a close up of a clitoris (no credit), I am saying essential. Available in Europe via L.White
www.lwhite-records.de and Tesco Distro and in the UK via Peripheral Records.
http://muhmur.blogspot.de/2013/08/human-larvae.html--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Heathen Harvest:
My interest in Human Larvae was first piqued when I reviewed the first Epicurean Escapism compilation in April, 2013, their inclusion on that compilation are what got me into digging more into the music of Human Larvae. Before that I was only aware of Daniel Burfoot's project for his very first full-length Home Is Where The Hurt Is and especially its cover artwork, which is still one of my all time favorites. Five years later Human Larvae is back with a new record. Hosted in interesting, modest, but very beautiful packaging and what's more important with a sound far more refined (additionally perfected by James Plotkin's mastering), more convincing and complex, but still hostile, cold and harsh.
"Feed the eye what it desires...
sweet serenades of my destruction"
Perdition From The Virgin's Mouth
Womb Worship is offering a tight and violent grip that is compressing all your being in its thick aura. The density of the record, probably due to its conceptual nature and complexity, is the main strength of the recording. Right after the looping and grim piano chord of Perdition From The Virgin's Mouth rings for the very first time, you are starting a harsh sonic treatment, which just doesn't give you neither the time to breathe, nor to get distracted. Once the wall of sound of Womb Worship has started expanding you can't really make your way out of it. The album is extremely textural and rich. Noises from all types are finding their way through each other, thus directing the pieces in various courses. And once you feel a bit comforted by a sporadic static moments of perverse and harsh sonic hypnosis the distorted and heavy grunts of the Larvae intervene to wake up and enslave you again in this world of extremes.
"Lovesick death wish womb worship, forever scarred and left searching.
Repeating my misdemeanours until I rot in her blazing light"
Womb Worship
Even though Womb Worship is harsh, it's also a very musical album. Many details can be traced inside it and I'll try to get you a bit in its ambiance. The above mentioned opener, minimalist and gentle at first gradually evolves in a chaotic noise mantra, and is slowly disfigured in degrading pulse which gives life to a breathlike sound, somewhere between pleasure, pain and suffering. A complex state of mind, that I actually interpret as the actual leitmotif of the record. After the small The Truth I Failed To See piece which is acting as an interlude, but somehow still carries a lot of the essence of the record, Slave to Violence puts you in a realm constructed by metallic noises, tense and oppressive higher frequencies who are piercing the complex noise to sharpen your senses and then disappear like vivid and disturbing hallucinations.
Womb Worship's abrasiveness is almost constant, but at some point your ears are so used to enduring the ruthless exposure to Daniel's frequency abuse, that it's harshness is becoming more and more atmospheric (yet intense) than radically extreme. An example is Entwined In The Umbilical Noose, which after climaxing to distorted sound massacre is slowly murdered in a calming bass pulse. The piece that left me inexplainably worried and exhausted the most was Wrapped In The Warm Sheets Of Mother Love, spoken word intertwined with a harsh noise wall, which abducts you and abandons you in the cold cellar, soaked with anility Obsession Intermezzo II. However, the ultimate creation (and experience) in this relentless walk into the depths of the sound of Human Larvae, is the self-titled closing piece. It is the uncompromising end of a world which embraced you only to leave you defiled and disintegrated, so you can be used in its filthy violent game.
In Womb Worship, I could have gone into more detail and deeper than I attempted to do here, but music, especially as affective as the one we are exposed to here should be experienced and analyzed personally. One thing I hope for is that Daniel Burfoot stays active in the scene for many more years in the future. I am convinced his imagination, and captivating approach to sharing its (rotten) fruits, has a lot more worthy music to structure and expose to our masochistic minds.
Track List:
01) Perdition From The Virgins Mouth
02) The Truth I Failed To See
03) Slave To Violence
04) Entwined In The Umbilical Noose
05) Methods Of Possession
06) Wrapped In The Warm Sheets Of Mother Love
07) Obsession Intermezzo II
08) Womb Worship
Rating: 5/5
Written by: Angel S.
Label: L. White Records (GER) / CD (Limited to 300) / LW-073
http://heathenharvest.org/2013/08/14/human-larvae-womb-worship/
