I was interested to read that the debut album by Tasmanian band Sens Dep, being the abbreviation of Sensory Deprivation, was recorded over four years in a tin shed, an alpine hunter’s hut, concrete inter-zones, and the Tasmanian wilderness. The suggested output is a mix of experimental ambient post-rock shoegaze. I was to find that out but the salient point seems to be this apparently ambitious project is about these environments and the relationship of humans with them.
Eerie sounds of alien worlds are our introduction. There’s a dark undercurrent beneath the distorted obscurity. Sound waves maybe signal that the aliens are landing. This is not life as anyone would know it. Stylistically, it’s noise. The third piece on this ambient dreamscape is the title track. It is indeed desolate and it is lush, but I see grey overriding green. As the sound waves blow across, I hear the beat of drums. All the time it’s like tuning an old radio and trying to find the channel. There’s a morose tune being pumped out behind the interference-laden noisescape of “Server Hum, Deep Sleep”. A deeply melancholic section rises out of the bleak scene. For the first time on “Nebuvital”, we hear a human voice but it is understated and befits the gloomy tone of the song. Where earlier I could recall the harshness of Blut aus Nord, now the atmosphere has the dreamier expanse of Tiamat or Pink Floyd with a post-rock progression. This leads into the slow-burning sadness of “Bound”, which bizarrely stops midway through to wake us from our dream before restarting and pattering slowly and gloomily to its sad end. I reflected that this album needed a pick-me-up before we all descended into total gloom and despair. It’s never good news when you hear a cello however, and “To Build Fire” piles it on. The whispering vocals are strongly reminiscent of Tiamat’s Johan Edlund. The overt misery does transform thanks to an expanse of ambient sounds, which bring a mystical element to this work. The drum beats before the brakes are applied, as “Will You” changes sonic direction. The drum continues to beat and its hypnotic vibe transcends the catalogue of noise in the background. “Come Back for Me” starts with a sound like a distorted radio signal as if an attempt at contact is being made. It stops, and we drift through the ether. It becomes more expansive, and with it the experience becomes cosmic, not for the first time. This leads to the fuzzy distortion of “Drowning Entanglement” and the darkest and most anarchic, experimental sound experience of the album. For the final piece we find ourselves swimming once more in a dream, as the patient post rock beat of “Luckless Hunter” is paired with drifty, woozy, echoing ambience.
Tune your ears, and you will hear an album inhabited by dreamy atmospheres. Sens Dep themselves refer to their “textured noise and sonic ruminations”. “Lush Desolation” is interesting and different.
(8/10 Andrew Doherty)
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