Songs of Love and Decay- Album Evaluate

Damaged English Membership: Songs of Love and Decay

(Dekmental)

Out Now

DL  | LP (Bandcamp)

On Songs of Love and Decay, not solely does Oliver Ho, aka Damaged English Membership, reach evoking the spirit of Juan Mendez, however by baring his chest between noise and kind, escapes the usually typical weight of reminiscence by pushing his machine-breed of techno occultism into the screaming coronary heart of the modern age. Interview and Evaluate by Ryan Walker.

One thing being about somebody is completely different from one thing being created within the reminiscence of them. An allusion to their reverential spectre. The distinction at first look won’t be that vital, but the excellence between dedicating one thing, say…a brand new album, say…one known as Songs of Love and Decay by Damaged English Membership, an album on Dekmantel UFO label the place their stuff-of-legend stage in Amsterdam turns into a stuff-of-legend LP collection, an album devoted to the reminiscence of somebody, say…Juan Mendez, aka Silent Servant, and easily making an album about them, is bigger than you would possibly assume.

For the spirit of somebody, a convincing slap of thunder imbuing the panorama with their insurmountable presence and foreboding affect in the end overrides merely writing an album about somebody – the mechanics of their self-destructive way of life, the hanger-on heartbreaks, their traumatic childhood, their profession triumphs – which, even when discussing somebody comparable to the enormous that’s Juan Mendez, would seem a relatively trite and underwhelming exercise.
AAModerately, the act of evoking his aura, guided by his incorporeal authority, the artwork of conjuring up and channelling his impact-crater vitality, is a much more endearing technique of not simply monumentalising a pioneering determine at midnight caverns of snarling techno and the collective ripples that surrounds it, however a extra creatively stimulating follow of endowing the work at hand with nothing besides ribcage-rattling requiems for the modern age of the very best calibre.

The spectral presence of the late Juan Mendez, comrade and collaborator for almost anybody in close-knit, brooding techno circles bleeding via a caustic, post-punk filter, pulsates via the file. Because it did with Sandwell District’s Finish Beginnings, launched this 12 months, that includes a sleeve designed by Mendez. Songs of Love and Decay roughly marks the last decade since Damaged English Membership debuted on Jealous God, a label launched by Karl O’Connor, Mendez and James Ruskin in 2013.
AA”Sure, this album does mark round 10 years since I debuted my first launch on his label, it was such a potent method to start this journey, these first data had been actually necessary for me to go looking and discover my sound, to search out the soul of the music,’’ says Ho. ‘’We first met in LA within the late 90s, my brother lived there so I might spend time hanging on the market, I performed a number of exhibits and finally met Juan, and did a remix for him, that was the start of the connection, we’d keep in contact, and chat about obscure bands and pictures and stuff, we at all times had a lot to talk about, our pursuits had been very numerous and we felt that music, artwork, movies, pictures had been all a associated and all an enormous affect on our artistic course of.
AA”The final time we spoke was at Tresor in Berlin, I noticed him and his spouse, it was solely 2 months later that they each handed away, it’s tough to place into phrases, the shock and disappointment.’’

There’s an undercurrent of melancholy there sure, a susceptible contact of sorrow to complement the bone-gnawing brutality that penetrates every little thing to its bloody axis, however with the chimera that was Mendez, a reminiscence maneuvering all through the file, which really, represents one thing broader than the intricacies of 1 man’s life and the implications of his loss of life, we’re removed from disappointment, removed from remorse. To say that …Love and Decay is a ‘unhappy’ album can be a grave injustice to the work at hand. This album isn’t even about him. It’s about a lot extra. As he would’ve wished, the prodigal son (one in every of many prodigal little kids) takes his profession by the horns and drives it into the path he so chooses. Conformity, in any case, is cowardice. Mendez understood that. Ho understands that, too.

The White Rats trilogy, a saga which began in 2018 and concluded in 2021, established Ho as greater than a techno-punk producer however an artist who simply so occurs to make use of the techno medium as an acceptable vessel to hold the message alongside. A step or two onward, and sideways from the concentrated, conceptual concepts articulated inside the bold L.I.E.S trilogy launch, or his final standalone file Synthetic Animals, a much less overtly political rhetoric however nonetheless a densely layered file, blooming with narratives that think about the fraught interaction between people, nature and know-how; that is an album of simply as a lot white-knuckle emotional gravitas as these releases.
AABut, the first focus right here is on the thought of fabricating solitudinous secure havens within the form of songs, that when compounded collectively, create the overarching narrative of the album. The album kind as a form of interface, a manner of dealing with the slew of chaotic horrors that dominate each second of each broadcast, each inch of obtainable area – on-line, and within the thoughts, an inescapable avalanche. If maybe we create artwork, or make it customized to familiarise itself with its energy, we would have an opportunity of remaining secure within the data {that a} connection to a set of tracks can present a short lived antidote to no matter could also be ready to strike.
AA”White Rats was very a lot a set of concepts. It began across the time of Brexit and the rise of right-wing teams, and the best way these societies had been changing into extra fragmented, and folks had been changing into politically tribal, changing into extra excessive of their beliefs. With this present album, I wished to take the sound into a much bigger space, push the sounds into heavier and much more trendy sonic territory. The music guides the best way, however there are such a lot of concepts going via my thoughts whereas I’m engaged on music, so these narratives seep into the method. This album was about processing emotion via a sort of dream course of, permitting my unconscious to create worlds that this music inhabited.
AA”I had collected numerous tracks that had been all relating to one another, they’d a brutal melancholy, some had been fairly experimental and others had been very pure membership tracks, however all of them felt like there was connection, when this begins to occur its time to begin excited about forming an album, then the thought of the general theme got here into focus. The music leads the best way, I attempt to be a servant of the music, let it information me.’’

A foreboding climax of car-crunching electronics leads us to A Shallow Lake. A tune that happened first together with Pacific Island Kill and Evening Fall, it ignites a flare of vapour trails melodically lingers within the skies of the thoughts, continuously hovering, immovable and nonetheless while a progressively awakening machine graphically punctuates the stillness of the unnerving smog in a cacophony, visceral discharge of ball bearings and nail bombs. Subsequent, Crawling sees a dystopian techno pulse cruise alongside a path completely of its personal making, joined by a spectrum of unsettling atmospheric textures shifting to their very own unyielding, rhythmic mechanism- a cracking whip peeling the pores and skin off one’s shoulders as if it was plaster on a decaying wall, an ominous choreography of cavernous clockwork and physique music groove.
AAPray, kneel, dream, kill, once more. A rallying cry commenting on the cyclical equipment that underpins every little thing in trendy life, echoed out of 1 unconscious zone and into one other by Ho, hollering this profound maxim into the throng of an immense, orgasmic techno dirge, Dying Cult connects to this chorus rising out of the darkish waves, the deep areas, the recommendations of dormancy syncopated to a pulsating thrust of flesh and bone, human and machine. As two minutes twists into the third, the heartbeat quickens, the rhythm takes maintain, there isn’t a air, no escape, however lookup for lengthy sufficient, and hold wanting, for a brigade of melodies soften objects start to buckle below the extraordinary gaze of unimaginable centigrade, taut scourge of muscular, mutant EBM energy gyrates into the ghostly jaws of a pitch-black void.

Sacred Sacrifice, Vessel of Pores and skin, Prisoner, though we don’t want vocals to establish some form of story to the album, Ho’s voice helps conjure up a visible of a scene, a visceral fragment snatched from a broader panorama injected into the purposeful electronics of what he does. One thing ritualistic. A burial. A rebirth. Is there a story to what Damaged English Membership does? Is the narrative on this file Mendez or one thing else?
AA”The narrative is at all times necessary for me within the artistic course of, it helps to create dynamics and a sort of terrain or panorama over which the music drifts, like some sort of sonic climate. Lyrics are fairly necessary within the artistic course of; generally they get used, and generally there are lyrics to instrumental tracks that by no means get used, however are necessary for me to know the place the music is coming from.
AA”The album shouldn’t be about Juan, however it’s devoted to his reminiscence; it felt necessary to do that,” Ho explains. ”The album was exploring concepts of mortality, and a stage of my life the place I used to be wanting into the duality of life, power and kind, life and loss of life, love and decay. The concept of acceptance, that pleasure and disappointment are a part of the identical expertise, that creation and destruction are a part of a single power. The homage revealed itself at a later stage, it felt proper to do that, probably the most significant method to specific this loss.’’

The concept of a territory on high of which the music visits, devours, after which exits is a palpable function all through. We’re made to really feel like we’re standing on the foot of a large monolith, backed towards the partitions of some towering monument. The physicality of what Damaged English Membership does is a dimension to the music that we can not ignore, nor escape. The extra we run from it, the extra it reaches for us, and sucks us again into the centre of wherever it so pleases to entertain.
AASadomasochistic, supernatural, like a pre-Dare Human League hung above a vat of hydrochloric acid, Vessel of Pores and skin leans heavy on the club-equipped road sounds keys while additionally unafraid to complement its steamy, stiff grind with a heady dose of soundtrack drama and Chilly Battle paranoia. Ho’s vocals are sparse – shadows of strangers flickering out and in of focus, as flints of quick sparks sometimes illuminate a wasteland of warehouse yards that haven’t been visited in years. However the phrases we establish are honest.
AASubsequent, Evening Fall is a machine brawl of thick reduce techno beats of primordial energy summoned up via sheets of metal and slabs of concrete to wreak havoc on the world they’re greeted with. Clouds of cellophane synthesisers, dazed in reverie, stretch out with the solar struggling to remain afloat behind it. Tappings and trappings of intoxicating electronics dance atop the blockades of brutal buildings beneath.

Dying and Leisure, Love and Decay, a balancing act, or an try to connect with the steadiness between heady dancefloor pump, ionised industrial abrasion and expansive, cinematic transcendence, between this world and one other, is necessary within the Damaged English Membership lexicon. It retains the work’s momentum future-facing proper, retains testimony free from being superficial and trite, retains the stylistic shifts dialled into the correct quantity of retro, and the correct quantity zero, the correct quantity now, and the correct quantity of the peripheral wilderness that wracks the work into extra experimental, metallurgical extremes. Stability, sonically and philosophically talking, a mediating perspective shared by all worlds, a knot in want of untying to set us free, or tightening till we will’t breathe, and essential at all times to take care of an genuine allegiance to expressing, exhausting ambition, with out the expense of exploiting the artistic efforts of others, is what Damaged English Membership ship.
AA”I attempt to ignore stuff that doesn’t curiosity me, or stuff that’s shallow and boring. I don’t need to waste my vitality on hating stuff, it’s too poisonous. I really fairly admire stuff that’s actually retro; the dedication to an thought must be 100% to realize that. I’m at all times shifting the place I’m wanting, so I’m by no means too distracted by a single music scene; there’s a lot on the market to delve into. I like a lot of the techno being made proper now, however there’s additionally nice steel stuff, nice dub, hardcore punk and jazz. ‘’Just lately,” Ho says, “I’ve been fairly fascinated by a noise artist known as Vomir, the stuff he makes is pure industrial noise, like Merzbow, there’s virtually a philosophy to his stuff. A sort of nihilistic nirvana.’’

This album, a nihilistic nirvana of one other form, is a fierce spectrum that encapsulates a concentrated tangent of all of the types that Ho has experimented with, and mastered up to now. From extra experimental items to tracks that reload the dancefloor, all of them are linked collectively by what Ho deems ‘’an environment and depth of sound,’’ enabling the tracks to float and dart, into and away from, particular stretches of area, frames of exercise they really feel the necessity to compelled sufficient to invade, imbuing them with their very own distinctive, purposeful groove.
AA‘’I’ve sure sounds and tones that I’m drawn to, drones, crackles, metallic sounds, these are evocative for me, I’m looking for these sounds on a regular basis, it doesn’t matter how they get made although, I exploit synths, guitars, samples, audio recordings, something and every little thing is a supply of sound. I work in a collage manner, laying sound down like I’m creating a picture. I usually method the music prefer it’s a scene inside a movie.
AA“I wished to make one thing that was clearly techno, but in addition had fringes that had been seeping into different issues, one thing that’s each pure stable and dissolving, that’s attention-grabbing to me. I used to be studying a guide known as Hope, Religion and Carnage by Nick Cave. It appeared to reflect issues that had been changing into necessary in my life, concepts about creativity and mortality, for me, it was additionally about brutality and melancholy.
AA”I hearken to largely loss of life steel, a whole lot of new stuff. It’s the strain that I like. I feel that possibly I used to be making an attempt to make a techno album that had the identical compressed sound strain of a steel album. I by no means have guidelines, solely instructions I need to pursue. I needed to let all these items take me in the direction of one thing, one thing that ended up being this album.’’

From Juan Mendez or Karl O’Connor or Hayden Payne or Justin Broadrick or Mick Harris or Helena Hauff or Ron Morelli or Dominick Fernow- there’s a case to be made for audiences confidently recognising their names and, because the proponents of a sort of bleeding-edge, mutant machine electronica that might combust at any given second but stubbornly continues to churn, use them as a fairly stable barometer for some bloody good machine-music dirge about to be skilled in artists which might be, in some methods greater than others, reduce from the identical fabric, or no less than come to be begrudgingly related through default in later life. The varied break up releases and collabs (Violence and Divinity), the aspect initiatives (Gradual White Fall, Life Burial), the file labels (Cititrax), all feed into this concept that the tapestry is the work of many finely positioned stitches at play, relatively than the results of one particular person.
AAThe scene has its rebels, its exiles, its opinionated agitators, however that’s an excellent factor. Extra music must be made, and digression, as a lot as connection, can spare that yet-to-be-made music being diluted because of scene-critiqued compromise or techno-experts in diehard viewers factions. A few of which come nearer to advocating on-line aerobics lessons than experiments with menacing electronica. However nonetheless, encouragement and expertise have to be humbling.
AA”I’ve individuals I relate to as artists, there may be undoubtedly a gaggle of individuals the place you possibly can see a whole lot of connections, and there are some related concepts being pursued. That is actually inspiring to me, to have the ability to see what I’m doing in a bigger manner, as a part of one thing greater than simply myself,’’ says Ho. ”I’ve my obsessions and I allow them to information me, they take me to the lake to drink from, I allow them to nourish me. I’m at all times in search of methods to dream, to dream new worlds and areas, I attempt to let all of the issues that encourage me seep into me as an artist, to embody all these items.
AA””I have no thought how I’m seen or don’t have a view on how I see myself actually, that’s for different individuals to do. I’m largely consumed with my very own journey as an artist. How I can evolve, and what are the issues that I need to examine.”

Stable one second, but disintegrating the subsequent, like being thrown towards a sizzling wall of venomous acid-inflected electronics, wading via swamps of sizzling oil, pits of treacle and wheels of metal tooth, Pacific Island Metal slices towards the silence, in flip inflicting it to swell, a surging seige engine strikes the centre of the chest, and once more, and once more. As if incoming from one other dimension, urgent towards the floor of our personal, inflicting mounds of black and blue to erupt like some temporal bleed. Ho’s ripped transmissions bark rhythmically as a thud of gurgling drones, a progress of ethereal synthscapes and fizzles of fucked-up noise creates a temper each enchantingly wealthy in sensory element, while additionally being grotesquely perturbing in how flesh melts towards, and meshes into, the machine world earlier than our very eyes.
AAWith a beat devastating the battlefield it descends into, Misplaced Gods additionally hones into the perimeters of Ho’s musical mindset knowledgeable by cinema and the symbiosis of sound and imaginative and prescient to create an all-engulfing second, the meticulousness of how an album begins, to the place it will definitely finally ends up, isn’t too dissimilar to how a director or author would kind out and redraft a script for a movie – scrawling in its margins, reducing and chopping, rewording and rearranging, erratically desperate to make sense of what they’re shedding sleep over at evening; the web page as a chunk of residing, respiration thought-process in movement. ”I can generally begin with a word on my cellphone, up to now I might write out my songs in phrases, describing how I wished the observe to sound. I might write out the whole album as an outline.’’

We are able to think about a scene of disturbing motion, a conflict projected towards a veil as its disorienting sample of wings, a flapping propeller snapping forwards and backwards earlier than a hideous rupture dissolves every little thing right into a spool of screaming digital glitches. After it, but on the different finish of the spectrum, Prisoner proceeds to punch via the core of wherever it desires to.
AAElsewhere, whereas Misplaced Gods or Pacific Island Kill, all stark modernist angles scarred by the filth that gathers round them, erect a extra cerebral, however no much less caustic collection of movement image buildings, Prisoner is an unrelenting powerhouse of darkish, rave-edged techno. Frantic palpitations lap us up in its everlasting spell. Metallic claps pang within the distance, a low-rumbling motor scrapes away beneath a effervescent acid alarm, a hi-hat sample sputters as a synapse-snapping laser stares all through the motion. The bass drum briefly disappears, solely intensifying the ominous, analogue sweatbox, virtually inflicting complete apertures to look in a distant equator.

There’s as a lot Clock DVA and Cabaret Voltaire in Ho’s blood in addition to roots in tribal 90s techno and synthwave. Though simply Ho on the controls, Damaged English Membership will be seen via the filter of collective enter, a set of conditions established and largely related to how bands would ordinarily function – a rehearsal, a recording, a stay gig, and so on, that give the looks of a number of minds and our bodies at work.
AAAll of it appears to function on that early industrial, DIY electronics stage, as a lot as being plugged into the heartbeat of techno music, as a lot as Throbbing Gristle had been extra about industrial music, however the numerous connotations that got here with being a religious disciple of the band, as a lot indebt to what they mirrored in regards to the perils of existence in the event that they dare to peek behind the veil with them and the vary of pioneering sounds they introduced into public data, or no less than the data so far as the communicative radius of people who had been of their shut social circles or had them on their radar, via their obsessive explorations with esoteric electronics, unique dissemination mediums and excessive music. Ho arguably has introduced this concept into the modern techno-loving age. A simulation of guitar, bass, and drums, particularly on his earlier releases, such because the Jealous God debut, or the Scars EP.
AA”Oh, undoubtedly, I like a lot of that early industrial music like Cabaret Voltaire, TG, Coil, Whitehouse. These bands are an enormous affect, together with steel stuff like Napalm Dying, Slayer and SunnO))).
AA”There is a feral wild spirit in early English digital music that influenced quite a bit, however I wished to take this and make it my very own, and to modernise it. There are concepts of historical pagan stuff that runs via a whole lot of Coil, which has fed into my music too. I stay close to some highly effective historical religious websites like Avebury and Stone Henge.”

From the tempestuous, evident hound of his debut, Suburban Searching, to follow-ups The English Seaside and Myths of Metal and Concrete, a sure dystopian occultism has a powerful maintain on Ho’s outlook. Averbury and Stone Henge have an unconscious, umbilical connection to Ho. They hang-out his grounds. They spike the lens via which he perceives actuality and unfold themselves all through his portrayal of subcultural wastelands, the agricultural non-places, and inform the landscapes evoked all through the tunes. ”The occult has at all times been a supply of inspiration to me. The occult is actually a collective time period for numerous types of religious/psychological philosophy, together with alchemy, pagan nature religions and in a extra trendy sense, chaos magick. Loads of these concepts place the person and their creativeness as a central power of creation and an lively power. They place artwork and science as an equal pair.
AA”In trendy chaos magick, the person and the act of creativity is seen as a central a part of making actuality. These concepts are very potent to me, they usually encourage me as an artist and as a human. The concepts additionally don’t have the dogma that organised religions do, as they converse in a way more poetic manner, and the language is rather more esoteric. The occult is a way more versatile and open method to navigate religious and metaphysical concepts.
AA”The concept of location as narrative has at all times been necessary in my artistic course of, with Suburban Searching and The English Seaside, these concepts had been very concrete. Just lately, I’ve moved to the Cotswolds and have become influenced by the traditional significance of religious stone websites, particularly Avebury. The stone websites symbolize one thing very highly effective to me, they symbolize the human thoughts and its need to attach the land to the sky, to attach the thoughts to the universe, to see connections. Additionally they symbolize the will to create, to position artwork into the world, to alter the world via creativeness. They appear to retailer this historical vitality inside them, they resonate with one thing very primal.
AA”I not too long ago recorded an album known as A Circle In Stone below my VEIL identify, it was immediately impressed by Avebury, I wished to permit the stones to speak to me of their silent historical voice, and I might translate their secrets and techniques into sound and music.”

Sacred Sacrifice is a deep tissue therapeutic massage of sensory-enveloping atmosphere. A translation of secrets and techniques. A voice out of silence. Ho’s voice is caught floating throughout the view, the physique elsewhere, suspended between areas, the rat bait containers, the the galvanised steel garbage bins, the deserted automobiles, the Neolithic buildings eroded into shapeless slabs, interrupted solely by a grumbling detonation of bass dust, a drop of bowel-obliterating gravity, a wailing synth cracking a canvas of ice aside. Ghost, in the meantime, is an equally eerie tour of rogue techno, resounding warbles of meaty, cracked leather-clad bass pads discovering deep satisfaction in fisting via a tunnel of sludge caught to all facets of the rim. Piss, petrol, still-burning damp firewood outlining the nowhere backroads eternally unfurling into the longer term and the previous, The Occult Physique, a suitably dramatic exit to the file, costs at us with tribal burst of noise, heavy-breathing beats breach via a manic shrapnel blast of burning electro swoops making an attempt to unstick themselves from a strip of effervescent adhesive.

After greater than a decade, nonetheless an ever-restless artist, the previous pouring into the longer term, the longer term informing the instructions of the current, at all times curiously bent on breaking the enamelled mould of custom, but by no means shedding sight of the fierce spirit that possesses, that twists out the thematic and stylistic extremes at both aspect of the spectrum, that teases sabotaging steadiness as a way to strengthen the good magnificence that arises when it will definitely returns to it’s rightful strike; simply the place does Oliver see his new album sit within the physique of labor?
AA”It’s tough to speak about it in such an goal manner,” he feedback, ”I actually do love the album, a lot of what’s taking place on it excites me, and offers me concepts the place to go sooner or later. I’ve an thought for my subsequent album already. It is going to be fairly completely different. I feel that, ultimately, this album was a manner of claiming goodbye to a number of the stylistic sounds and themes which have develop into related to Damaged English Membership. A closing of a ten-year chapter. The following chapter might be someplace that’s undeniably Damaged English Membership, however getting into into a brand new part on the similar time.”

Now, although, think about Songs of Love and Decay his definitive jackknifing.

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Damaged English Membership| Bandcamp

Dekmantel | Web site 

Ryan Walker | Louder Than Battle