Spektr - Mescalyne cover artwork

Rating: 7.8

Country: France

Release Date: 2002

Track list:
1.   Hollow Contact   06:43
2.   Mescalyne   05:37
3.   Maze of Torment   04:57
4.   Revelations   05:41

Total playing time   22:58

Band Website: Spektr

Spektr - Mescalyne

kl.K. - drums, vocals, samples, programming
Hth - guitars, bass, vocals, samples, programming

The French alchemists of the stupidly named Spektr seem to see black metal as more of a science than a form of music. For a reference point, imagine the smoldering debris of Thorns and The Work Which Transforms God-era Blut aus Nord orbiting around a black hole of planet-eating industrial black ambience. Alright, have you visualized that? Now imagine that black hole being stretched into infinity by the tidal forces of a larger black hole; then that black hole being swallowed by an even bigger, meaner black hole, and so on. Mescalyne achieves a level of weirdness that can be seen as the musical equivalent of dividing by zero, if you will.

Layers of programming and sampling dominate the majority of this EP, with the actual instruments restricted to polyrhythmic brickshitting. Much like the previously mentioned Thorns, the guitar tone's distorted into an abrasive blur that seems to exist in shards rather than a singular presence, prancing in angular stop/start patterns upon amorphous time signatures with as many skanky (yet somehow strangely compelling) drum 'n bass breaks as blastbeats. All of this is shrouded in ambient fuzz, stumbling keys and creaking spoken word passages to form a mathematical and generally fragmented whole that I could imagine Xenu listening to. Mescalyne seems to sit in the same league as recent Deathspell Omega and Blut aus Nord releases in that it's an obscure concoction rife with ruthless atonalities and ambient smudges, so if you're looking for melody, just go away right now. We don't take kindly to your type 'round these parts.

Unlike Deathspell Omega, however, Mescalyne's structural spontaneity and density doesn't seem to serve the purpose of achieving some absurd apex of extremity. Even during Spektr's most blasting moments, that seething, digital guitar sound is more skin-crawling, hair-raising, and various other [body part]-[verb] idioms than physically oppressive; there's always a lingering feeling some door will fly open revealing a fat guy in a fursuit blowing an old man like that one part in The Shining, which just seemed baffling and stupid at first, but years later turned out to be the only scene of the movie that burned itself into your retinas.

A few hours after hearing this, I challenge you to remember what you heard. You'll probably remember your initial reaction, whether you wanted to piss yourself or race around neo-France on a futuristic motorcycle (or both), but good luck trying to reenact Spektr's antics in your head. This means the EP is hugely replayable, but for all its chromatic sheen and complexities, it suffers a bit from lack of structural stability. The band would probably argue that's intentional, so take from this what you will.

So, is Mescalyne a challenging, cerebral piece of black art, or pseudo-intellectual wank? Let's ask Spektr's press release.

"This should not be seen as a gathering of two humans playing music, for it doesn't simply stand for "music," but a real communication between an incarnated being and vibrations coming from a non-manifested paradigm where the essence of what has suffered thousands of incarnations and names wanders eternally through the halls of it's[sic] last breath."

Umm, quite. So probably a little of A and a little of B. Still, I couldn't care less; whatever it is, it gets under my skin and draws me into the best hallucinogenic cyberpunk horror film never directed. Fuck, I ended my first paragraph with "if you will"; if you're still with me, you should probably just hear this.

March 7th, 2008