Live improvisation, Crypt of St John on the Wall
Out 7th June, self-released
The name Dead Space Chamber Music is a concise summation of the intent and meaning behind this band. Whilst the term “dead space” immediately invokes a feeling of remoteness, it could just as easily refer to areas and structures just off the beaten track, near areas of bustling activity but long discarded by the march of history. Forgotten ruins, underground vaults, or patches of woodland, areas pregnant with eerie acoustics, decaying architecture, and the fading memory of the purpose and significance once bestowed upon them by long dead ancestors.
Capturing the sound of these places is an inherently temporary, improvised, or accidental affair, best suited to looser musical forms less troubled by structural hygiene. The formalities of chamber music is brought into collision with the random acoustic events of the various environments it encounters.
This live recording of the improvised collaboration with the darkwave outfit hackedepicciotto sees Dead Space Chamber Music’s manipulation of arcane musical forms meet with a cold, clinical modernism, as drone, industrial percussion, noise, and random flecks of traditional melodic contouring melt together in a work both anachronistic yet oddly familiar.
Dead Space Chamber Music’s use of medieval forms adds a haunting – in the literal sense of the word – underlayer to this performance. They adopt a ghostly, liminal half-life. Melody is subsumed under the pulsing, modernist energy of electronic noise. Traditional instrumentation such as strings and vocals relegate themselves to forming waves of ambience. The connection with a musical past slowly fades, surrendering to the cold entropy of progress articulated via guitar drone, and a driving, artificial percussion giving rise to the lurking spectre of industrial.
Whilst some individual contributions are easily discernible, Ellen Southern’s unmistakably melancholic vocals or Alexander Hacke’s throat singing for example, the improvised and loose ambient nature of this recording makes attributing separate elements to individual musicians a guessing game. For instance, the explicitly electronic structuralism – presumably brought to the fore by hackedepicciotto’s contributions – works in constant antagonism to the organicism of the fragile violins, bells, and strained vocal lamentations. The modernist, industrial drive imposes itself to the extent of framing the entire recording, echoing the unstoppable march of technological progress as it bulldozes over pockets of history deemed unworthy of reverence or preservation in the eyes of popular wisdom.
As with Dead Space Chamber Music’s two studio albums, there is an undeniable cross appeal to this music, one that goes deeper than other artists attributed with the potential for a broad audience pull. It is peripheral music in every sense of the word. Both in terms of genre, with its references to folk, industrial, goth, metal, ambient, neoclassical, and industrial to name a few. But also in terms of its ability to lift us out of our hyper connected present, and place us in a space that takes memory seriously, in stark contrast to the cheap nostalgic pastiche that has permeated 21st Century pop culture thus far. The combination of wistful melancholia, fragile melodicism, the eerie drones representing a sonic shadow of spaces far off the beaten track of our increasingly accelerated lives, all forge a lasting sense of connection with the history of both place and sound.
For that reason, it should be noted that whilst the recordings are an invigorating listen, this music is almost designed for a live setting, one that uses its very environment as an instrument. History, architecture, and ambient sound all play a key role in the textural and dynamic range, giving each performance a ritualistic sense of occasion. This live recording therefore represents the next best thing over and above Dead Space Chamber Music’s studio recordings, giving us a closer glimpse into one these events.
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