If anyone’s capable of sonically replicating the sound of a human brain dissected and rewired by the hands of a grinning sadist, this is it. Imagine all those album covers from melodic death metal bands covered with screaming faces but that actually sound like the kind of thing your little brother’s annoying friend would turn up listening to. The Empirics Guild, surely, is the sound the poor sods in those pictures hear eternally tormenting the inner nerve endings of their tympanic membrane. This is a darkly conceived reality. A hour in the mind of someone trapped in a sadistic medical experiment who wakes up to find that voices just aren’t voices anymore but whirls of static scraping against their ear drums and their limbs replaced by some mixture of jagged steel and biomechanical horror. The Empirics Guild is a slowly scarifying assault that erodes rational judgement and inflicts torment and the promise of respite upon the listener in almost equal measure. The static chattering could be your evil keeper or simply someone trying to reach you through the madness. There are screams dimly heard and some truly unnerving wailing that sits on a knife edge between the orgasmic and excruciatingly painful. But at other times the trauma lifts for a few moments to be replaced something that might even be described as calm – if you didn’t know better.
Welcome to the world of post-industrial power electronics. An acid trip gone badly wrong or a subliminal message from the deep recesses of your brain screaming to you but thankfully, for most of us at least, normally supressed. Texan dark sound connoisseurs Steel Hook Prostheses are here to turn that on its head. To bring those dark moments to the surface and hold them right before your eyes, pulsing and skinless. The Empirics Guild sits somewhere between dark ambient and its more mind-screwing punk half-brother, noise. But, while there are some pretty haunting moments, it stops short of some other wilfully terrifying stuff the genre has to offer exercising levels of subtlety and restraint. Tracks like Disfiguring Aesthetics have more in common with the output of more darkly trippy outfits like Lustmord than the more sonically lethal recesses of the noise scene. Something quite specifically disturbing has been produced here rather than merrily hacking into what are left of my brain cells with a claw-hammer.
It even manages to break out of its made-in-a-vile-forgotten-asylum ambience at times on tracks like The Blood Cough where we can imagine our rewired hero stumbling into the outside world and trying to make sense of a new reality where his brain is receiving deep, basal sounds instead of colours and light. It’s perfectly tempered but it still leaves you feeling like some small part of the casual and sadistic abuse visited upon those you imagine are at the centre of this journey has also been inflicted on you. This is a sound that should come with a mental health warning. Something that makes the PMRC’s attacks on heavy metal in the 1980s even more risible than they were in the first place. Something that is truly subversive for daring to fling the doors to the dark recesses of the human mind wide open even more than Huey Lewis and the News did for Patrick Bateman. Not for the faint hearted, mentally unstable and definitely, definitely not for the criminally insane.
To describe this as music would be being too generous. There is the occasional stab at rudimentary electronic melody, such as on Gula, but it is no more than cursory and comes sewn between layers of carefully constructed electronic noise, extremely distorted vocals and various sounds that are not unlike the ones my TV began emitting with a low, incessant hum right after the last thunderstorm.
But, once you’ve got over the lingering threat that your guts may evacuate their contents via one or more orifices (if you’re having trouble with that then just sit back and enjoy the tracks with the accompanying videos flying around on the internet), there is an undeniable horrific beauty here that begs far more questions than it answers. Is this torment simply in the minds of the mentally ill, only in the minds of the would-be perpetrators or even just that speck of latent darkness buried deep within us all and waiting for a chance to grow? If you’d rather not have your brain tampered with, then walk on by. If you enjoy going to bed at night with the feeling that the world you woke up to will never be the same again, then look no further. Steel Hook Prostheses is the band for you.
(7.5/10 Reverend Darkstanley)
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