If you recognise the most deliberate nod in the title of this album (to The Axis Of Perdition for the uninitiated) then not only will you have a vague idea for the turmoil, chaos and noise within but will also know I’m pretty much on a hiding to nothing attempting to review the third album from this one man project by John Rogers. But here we are because when my brain can take it, the previous releases by Iskalde Morket have scratched a certain dissonance loving itch and have carved out a small, strange corner of the UK extreme music scene.

The album is a nightmare. A nightmare based on Rogers’ experiences as a UK NHS health care professional during the pandemic – not just the terrible circumstances at work but just as much trying to cope with the bewilderment and anger caused by the ghastly slide into lunacy of political panic, incompetence and unbelievable self-serving greed with the rise in the conspiracy science denying brigade who crawled out of the chaos to call health workers liars and conspirators as they struggled to hold back the tide with defective and inadequate equipment.

So yeah, it’s difficult music on a difficult subject from a perspective hard to imagine unless you were one of them.

Pretty much hell, in fact.

‘Pathogenocide’ opens with a sample on the pale rider, then a clatter of drums and almost neo-classical chaos. The drums are manic, the riff and guitar shift from moment to moment with dissonant runs and mutant jazz scales. It slides into a disturbingly religious sound before the death jazz reasserts itself. As openers go this is like trying to grab hold of an angry porcupine. An apocalyptic death spasm set to music. The following passage ‘Copulating Opulence’ (or Oppulence if you get the ltd edition spelling version 🙂 ) turns its gaze to the Eton mess that lined their own pockets as the country jerked and collapsed, the ones who said ‘let the bodies pile up’ and got drunk at illegal parties. It lurches from noise/grind to worrying introspective moments as though walking through quiet homes and dead town centres. The vocals contort with anger, the drums become a relentless tirade with a blinkered vision snare and the guitar kind of whirls in confusion. Yet somehow it kind of becomes an almost shaped single piece of bewilderment.

See? Hiding to nothing. Perhaps it’s best to explain how it makes me feel. Perhaps that. It genuinely takes me back to those feelings of utter powerlessness and fury as I saw the UK and other countries being failed on all levels by ‘leaders’ as the plague ravaged and the poor sods in the healthcare professions got nothing but a round of applause. Not equipment or protections, just politicians standing on doorsteps clapping before going back to their party. At its worse there may be many who would hold an argument that it is cut-up music, sounds spliced together with no sense of order. But then you listen to ‘North Walsham II’ and hopefully others will hear a strange, dissonant and extreme progressive noise/death track full of bleak hopelessness and still that anger. And the title track is the most grim; darker than even the rest somehow. Khanate twisted horror, dead life monitors, and some lost souls walking through hospital corridors being slowly dragged into a nightmare.

Anger is a big part of this album. Anger alongside disbelief and confusion. If you have no time for trying to understand the experience that shaped it, perhaps it will be unlistenable. But maybe not. But for all its jerking, constantly shifting soundspace it feels true. It feels like an artist trying to force out the horror they have locked inside their skull from their very real experiences.

Sometimes things venture into experiences so unknown and never previously experienced, that they seem to warp reality into something else entirely. And I think Iskalde Morket have succeeded admirably in conveying that ripping apart of accepted reality, of conventional behaviours and reactions.

Difficult, angry, confused, desperately sad and, once more, bewildering. If you can take it, ‘Deleted Scenes From The Pandemic Ward’ is a remarkable album and it reminds me that the reality of the random chaos of the world is much, much worse than anything we can invent.

(8.5/10 Gizmo)

https://www.facebook.com/iskaldemorket

https://northwalshammisanthropia.bandcamp.com/album/deleted-scenes-from-the-pandemic-ward