ALBUM REVIEW: Blues And Doped Flowers From Twenty Three Years After Eschaton – Sigillum S & Macelleria Mobile Di Mezzanotte

The prevalence of 1980s nostalgia in 2021 cannot be ignored. Even for generations who were not present in these halcyon days, the popularity of television programs such as Stranger Things has exposed millions of younger people to an era that was unashamedly itself. This longing for the 1980s has not passed by music either. The ever increasingly popularity of synthwave, with groups such as CARPENTER BRUT and PERTURBATOR leading the charge, has modernised that sound of sawtooth synths and analogue synths, amplifying the dystopian sounds from this era, and appropriately bringing them forward to a time that is more dystopian than we would like to think.

Bearing this in mind, it would be a massive disservice to Blues And Doped Flowers From Twenty Three Years After Eschaton to call it a synthwave record. There is more in common here with the soundtrack to Dario Argento’s Suspiria or NINE INCH NAILS‘ darker and brooding side on The Fragile, but the comparison is still fairly incongruous. The project combines the collective brain power of MACELLERIA MOBILE DI MEZZANOTTE, whose name is taken from Clive Barker‘s novel Midnight Meat Machine, and SIGILLUM S, who describe themselves as “…the Italian deranged explorers of unknown territories among extreme electronics, fringe acoustics and occultist noise…” Both are stalwarts of the Italian experimental music scene, each with a vast roster of interesting and varied records.

This record is a real mood piece. Split into two fifteen minute movements, as a listener we are taken on a journey through a soundscape that is both unnerving and beautiful. A recurring motif throughout is the unsettling mechanical rhythm that pulses throughout both movements, centred around a melodic line that uses Minor 2nd and Major 2nd intervals, generating an unnerving sense of the inevitable.

Harsh industrial noise permeates through the record, at points sounding like voices crying out in the darkness. The opening of the album starts with a plethora of digital clicks and moans, as if some greater mechanical intelligence is waking from its slumber. Contrasting these harsher sections are parts which sound heady and neon lit, perhaps harking to the ‘Blues And Doped Flowers’ of the record’s title. These moments are the highlights of the record, especially when the saxophone can be heard permeating through all the electronics.

This record is one to be sat down and listened to with a fantastic set of headphones, to get the full scale of what SIGILLUM S and MACELLERIA MOBILE DI MEZZANOTTE have recorded. It is the perfect soundtrack for reading a William Gibson novel too, with the ambient sections of the record being a particular highlight. It is a heady and dense record, taking us from the end times into something new.

Rating: 8/10

Blues And Doped Flowers From Twenty Three Years After Eschaton is out now via Subsound Records.

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