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CD Feature/ Vidna Obmana: "Noise/Drone Anthology 84-89"

  Tobias

The future and the past are closely related. While travelling Europe with his latest and formidable Fear Falls Burning project, Dirk Serries is using the out-time from his Vidna Obmana alter ego to look back on 20 years of music - twenty years that have taken him from his Industrial roots into a league and in direct contact with the very best Ambient and Ritual artists on this planet.

With this, his second release in the “Anthology”-series, Serries goes all the way back to the beginning, when he was still searching for beauty in scrapyards. Abrasive sounds, clattering metal, stuttering rhythms, ghostly atmospheres - all the ingredients of the early noise pioneers are present, as well as the disturbing fluttering of opaque pads. Tracks are taken from old and long sold-out tapes and demonstrate that Vidna Obmana was all about finding intersections: Drones lift heavy Noise up into the air, while distorted sound particles swhirl through clouds of softly layered overtones. The difference with minimal and melancholy Fear Falls Burning couldn’t be more obvious, yet both projects share a common ground. Instead of acting as a one-dimensional outlet for aggression, they open up bizarre and foreign rooms for the listener to move around in. So anyone who is waiting for a brutal music massacre will be disappointed, while friends of spheric tones will be pleasantly surprised: If you close our eyes, you will actually feel your body travelling, instead of your fists clinching.

Although the CD spans a mere five years, the diversity of the pieces is remarkable and the various collaborations (with Nijmegen-based Kapotte muziek, among others) keeps the album fresh at all times. Which makes for the greatest compliment: After twenty years, this music still sounds as visionary and different from anything else as it did back then.

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