Aluk Todolo | website | facebook | bandcamp |
Released on February 5, 2016 via The Ajna Offensive / Norma Evangelium Diaboli
Plunged into Aluk Todolo’s new record Voix for the first time, what immediately sprang to mind was a vast iron machine I’d seen years ago in the Henry Ford museum in Detroit. The endless complex of hangars which comprises America’s largest museum collects together all kinds of famous and distinctive vehicles now at rest: the Rosa Parks bus, the Cadillac in which JFK was shot, and a car that looks like a hot dog. But the most impressive item, looming heavily over all the other contraptions, was the train. The most powerful steam locomotive ever built, apparently, stupidly big in its black metal scarab shell, the absurd gravity of the train thing bending perception through sheer improbability: like dung beetles pushing 250 times their own weight around, or bees scientifically proven to be unable to fly yet still able to wander lazily around in the sky. That train is what Aluk Todolo evoke at full tilt, simultaneously machine, alien and insect with myriad metallic parts whirring and clanking in peculiar rhythms, adding up to an uncanny propulsion despite or because of its vast strange weight.
The album bursts into the world with all pistons and gears and legs and wings all revolving and pulsing, skrittled along by inhuman, inscrutable but formidable intelligence, music designed by and for a consciousness seemingly used to more arms and legs than the four we’re used to, for thousand-faceted eyes or ears in your knees. Listening for the first time while driving at night (in my own metal ton of synchronized moving parts) the headlights for an instant lit up a scrapyard, a whole row of damaged car shells abandoned like a dusty ledgeful of dead insects. The music, it seemed, threatened to reanimate them all, the seemingly ordinary raw materials of metal magicked into life through some weird affinity with beetlelike carcasses.
Voix has the same menace of the band’s previous work, but it’s more insistently energetic than the abstract lurching of Descension or the deep space isolation of Finsternis. It’s closer to Occult Rock with its blocks of steel machinery, faster but never frantic in controlled complexity: but there’s not even really many riffs, or at least it’s not centred around them, since it’s all about the intricate unstoppable momentum of the dizzyingly interwoven rhythms.
It’s not all played out at top speed though, and there are moments where lower gears show a different power ration, which is just as compelling. There’s weird iron-horse venting and braying during a slower part on the fourth track, and some brake-screeching wails that provide some semblance of guitar excess on another (they’re all just named after how long they are, I think). Throughout though, the snittering beetling tlatlting percussion is always alert and inquisitive, giving everything a heightened sense of agile force. Listening to the album is to be deeply immersed in an altered way of perceiving, as if giving you a glimpse of what it would be like to view yourself from an alien insect machine perspective, but without knowing its motives. A strange and intense experience.
