ALBUM REVIEW: Hermes Slips The Trap – Interstitia
It’s refreshing to find an artist working with predominantly electronic soundscapes that isn’t relying on the good will towards synthwave to make music. Hermes Slips The Trap, the second record from INTERSTITIA, is his exploration into the unpolished and unrefined parts of his work, leaning into that to make a melodic and accessible record. Will he make his vision a reality?
Firstly, a total ambient experience, the intro to Ekstasis is a crackling, looping electronica track that swirls with a sense of otherworldliness and danger. The overall melody that kicks in is overloaded with layers of data, heavy grinding beats interlace, while something of a gentler section lies far within, mixed in with the sub-bass. Unusual synthesised tones trickle out, creating space soundscapes that don’t rely on the tried and tested modern plug-in standards. It’s a place somewhere beyond the mid-90s trance, and has that sense of nostalgia for a time not often reminisced on. There’s no hint of anything akin to synthwave – the 1980s ideals of today’s top dark, electronic genre – which makes a change. It’s a little directionless for its time length, and a little too messy to make a real impact with the few layers of sound that might evoke any emotion.
Bouncing through the stereo-sphere from left to right, Monument Eternal is another abstract tune that plays with dissonance a little more competently. Its frantic beat clashes with the serene and uncomfortably calm top layers of clean, echoing keys. When those layers flake away, we’re left with a swallowing, pulsing central theme that swoops and morphs from halfway pleasant to something that sounds sticky and probing in all the industrial sounds. Sharp, ringing tones dance through the space, and it’s all very strange. While this directionlessness is intentional, it still lacks anything that will gain more than passive interest.
The strangest of the lot so far, Rye Wolves is like if THE PUSH and HANS ZIMMER took a lot of drugs before trying to recreate the Interstellar soundtrack. Its flaky, sparking jitters through oscillating organs make for some really unusual sounds, but the way this track unfolds into something greater finally lands as something with at least some point. The movement shifts from strange beauty to frantic, over-processed alien hyperactivity. There’s a shift from the joyful to something unsettling and overwhelming, which is somewhere between elating and anxiety inducing. This is one of the better tracks, but arguably, it’s still way too jumbled for its own good. The sound of corruption brings to mind old illegally downloaded music files; too compressed to hear everything you’re meant to, all tone becoming fuzzy and crackled.
Axis Mundi is a colder, more broken beast. Slower and calmer, there’s a feeling of two totally different parts that could take over this track. The first vein is a jittering, hollow, rise and fall of ghostly electronic flickers, very distant from anything acoustic or human. The echoing, unthreatening wave of the second layer is beautiful but just as haunting as it falls in step with the motion and beat of the first section, swelling to meet its more dissonant counterpart. It’s hard to explain this sort of abstract, and there’s certainly nothing like it out there at the moment.
It will be no surprise that Marzeah is also pretty hard to pin down. Frantic, overtly busy sections give way to more open undulations wherein the smaller discrepancies and newer, more bizarre crackles and splutters bloom. Overall, it’s not the most unpleasant part of this record, but parts really don’t mix well into what’s already been established, and it’s as intangible and confusing as ever trying to listen out for every off tempo, shimmering, ‘phew-phew’ing, whirring noise that’s crammed into this space.
A titan length finale by the name of The Truly Angelic Must Instill Fear, seemingly has some structure to its start, with dubstep levels of bass rumbling below the percussive ticks and beats. It’s a slow burn at nearly 16 minutes, which allows you to settle into its deep, thick sub-bass. The heavily modulated layers that sit on top are trill, or bouncing, and even, dare we say it, musical. There’s a coherence through the first third that’s very pleasant and easy to lose yourself in, a gentle and otherworldly psychedelia. That begins to crumble into a cascade of delayed beats that all collapse upon each other, taking that flow and dropping a debris of out of sync notes that pull this track into a new direction. The second section is almost unrecognisable, with a huge change in tempo and the style of shrill electronic calls that still bounce inoffensively but hazily around. This tinkers through for the most part until a literal static conclusion forms, like a storm enveloping the scenery from a distance, the whirring and sighing of it drowning anything that came before.
This is by far one of the strangest albums released this year. Ambient electronica in the extreme, there are some great potential ideas in here. However, overall Hermes Slips The Trap is a directionless, overtly cluttered record that seemingly has no goal or intention and doesn’t abide by any rules set before. Because of the evident lack of care for musical arrangement or any sentiment it might evoke in a listener, INTERSTITIA’s abstract way of making music means he can occasionally produce something interesting for those willing to sit through it. However, for the most part, this is too far removed from anything close to coherent to claim huge listenership and will be lost to most as pure noise. If there were more interconnected direction to some of these tunes, which have some merit and quality, there might be a base of fans looking for something like this.
Rating: 5/10
Hermes Slips The Trap is out now via Pax Aeternum.
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