Beats and yelling: Liminal Spirit

Unwell
Out 31^st October, self-released

Somewhere between jazz, industrial, progressive doom, and ambient comes this concept EP preoccupied with the theme of mental degradation. The narrative follows an elderly dementia patient in a nursing home, “haunted by the spirits of two children who claim he murdered them decades ago”. In keeping with the artist’s moniker, the music reflects this non-space, between sanity and insanity, rationality and irrationality.

Cadences, phrasing, rhythm, all adopt the look and feel of conventional musical forms even as every resolution feels incorrect, off-kilter, resulting in a disorientating, uncanny experience, constantly gesturing toward a place of contentment and rest, only to pull back and segue into discomfort and unpredictability. The light of clarity snatched away in ever increasing gradations of violence as the EP progresses. This is perhaps made most explicit on the opening track ‘Admittance’ which ends with an epilogue sampling Jim Reeves’s ‘Welcome to my World’, which is subsequently followed by the title track ‘Unwell’ mirroring the contouring of Reeves’s vocal melody, but disjointed, out of place, only to slowly decay away into something new, unrecognisable, absurd. 

By the standards of explicitly experimental music, the raw materials that make up ‘Unwell’ are relatively modest . Flat, dry programmed drums ponderously march across each track, swaying between determined rhythms and a more lilting gait, threatening to collapse in on themselves at any moment. The guitar tone is warm and oddly amenable in stark contrast to the warped melodic lines they are forced to articulate here. A solid rhythmic base follows the dictates of the drums, with sustained lead harmonies(?) evolving out of the stew, creating a fog of brightness at once threatening yet inviting.

Liminal Spirit leverage microtones – literally the notes between notes – to burrow further under the skin of our preconceptions of how riffs, melodies, and phrasing should be formed. Even the most casual of listeners will have a rudimentary preconception of how they expect a particular melodic line to be phrased. This expectation comes from years of cultural osmosis. The more familiar we become with particular genres and styles, the more deeply this intuition is ingrained. Death metal, for example, exploits and upsets these expectations through its use of chromaticism, dissonance, and atonality. But one grows used to these tactics after years of familiarity with these techniques. Equally, pitch bending, either vocally or on stringed instruments, allows a musician to exploit microtones. As these are found in most genres of Western music from classical to blues, most people will be accustomed to microtones even if they are unaware of it.

But far from simply dropping them in to decorate particular moments, Liminal Spirit treat microtones as a bedrock of composition, accessed in a deliberate, jarring manner, and with increasing excess as the EP progresses. From a metal perspective, it’s akin to witnessing the incidental chaos of Voivodian dissonance gradually take on physical form, an explicit, lyrical yet nevertheless alien language. Entirely illegible and all the more frustrating for the fact that in some sense it mimics the topography of familiar cadential forms.

Even the brightest, choppy guitar line, undergirded by bouncy, playful rhythms, in this context they are imbued with the threat of the unexpected, the knowable collapsing into the entropy of amnesia. And as the EP progresses toward the final loss of one’s faculties, the rhythms strain, lurch, and tug at themselves, the space between each snare punch growing into unexpected intervals of sustained distortion as an explicit darkness beds in at the foundations.

As with any new form of music, repeated listens and concentration are required to get one’s ear into the moment. The difference between Liminal Spirit and a good chunk of ostensibly avant-grade entities operating on the peripheries of metal is just how transparent the machinations of this music are. Too often artists mistake experimentation for an excess of activity, material, genres, and work hard to unsettle the listener as much as possible through a random, multi-dimensional churn of material. Here all is clear, bright, materially knowable. Isolating each individual element is relatively straightforward, but in their totality they work toward a foreign teleology, the timetable and ultimate destination of which are unknown to the listener. This crystalises ‘Unwell’ as an expression of the descent into faculty loss, fleshing out the reality of this process with upsetting clarity.