Joachim Nordwall and Henrik Rylander pound out a powerful new Saturn And The Sun album on the former’s iDEAL Recordings, following up an album for The Tapeworm and the death of their band, The Skull Defekts, with a monotonous, harsh missive from the cold North.
Recorded at the legendary Gothenburg Sound Experiment in 2017, ‘In Love With The Extreme’ finds the duo explorating core influences, consolidating everything from ‘60s minimalism to early techno and tribal musics into a densely textured, future-primitive sort of rhythmic noise possessed with mesmerising traction and troubling distortion.
With brute force and admirably unrefined, intuitive intent, the pair palm out four hot streaks of molten electronics, fulminating tarry basses and noxious clouds of buzzing metallic overtones with pineal-pinching effect. This approach manifests stealthily in the subliminal transition from viscous atonal roil to undulating noise techno on opener ‘In Love With The Extreme’, while the bitter thizz and grungy bass distortion of ’Saturn War Chant’ feels like a slowed-down, ancient Viking battle cry to alien foe.
On ‘Cross The Line’ they invoke the elemental might of Mika Vainio in a hauntingly gutted and head-engulfing tract of high-register stress and sickly subharmonics, and again the charred electronics of ‘Pleasure Is Relief’ clearly nods to their departed peer’s Pan Sonic output.