Monolog – Conveyor

After the announcement of Nicolas Chevreux’s Ad Noiseam period of stand-by, its artists have chosen to follow different paths. End.user made a very good album released by Hands Productions, Gore Tech dedicated himself to his usb-label EXE, 2methyl’s new album will be released by Agnost1k Records, and Swarm Intelligence on the one hand started contaminating his sound with some techno industrial element (something similar could be said for Ontal too), on the other hand gave shape to the first Diasiva album, a collaboration with Danish musician-sound passanger Mads Lindgren, better known as Monolog, characterized by a sound in the halfway between breakcore-influenced drum ‘n bass and deep, slow and heavy rhythms.

After this quite enjoyable collaborative effort entitled Doublefade, on 10th February his new solo album, entitled Conveyor saw the light, published by the very appreciated Stefan Alt’s label Hymen Records, a sub-label of Ant-Zen. That’s the upteenth example confirming how well this German label is able to highlight and to make emerge the most “experimental” side of its artists. A perfectly balanced release, alternating slow and fast tempos, harder and “softer” atmospheres, also thanks to a wise tracklist, starting with the claustrophobic dark ambient of The shakes, progressively introducing slow and heavy beats in I will return to you from the abyss, beats slowly becoming a leading element in the mid tempo of Contraction until the breakcore-influenced very fast d ‘n b of Open blade return and Parse, this last one slightly lighter and vaguely old-fashioned, excluding the parenthesis of the slow and ambient The nothing room. After these two fast songs, the tempo slows down again until it reaches the dark ambient ending song, Regain. Other inspired songs are the slow, rock-like, metallic, dark and heavy Turmoil, and the less syncopated For Elisa, enriched by a classical piano.

Monolog has chosen to leave apart the drum ‘n bass-typical vocals of some of his older songs, adopting a deeper, more distorted and darker sound, focusing on low frequencies while introducing very heavy electric guitar distortions, adding them to the typical sound of the genre and shaping an insurmontable wall of sound, an inextricable tangle of sounds and beats covered by melanchonic atmospheres. This thanks to the use of desperate, negative sounds, and that’s what new industrial music is, or one of its modern forms anyway. We find an example in the percussions used in The nothing room, which seem recorded in an industrial factory.

When the album is played, the listener accepts to be conveyed into a both distressing and tempting bad trip, to move towards the abyss hoping to reach a place where to regain its energies. There aren’t any stops, and there isn’t any point of arrival. It’s a neverending journey, a train with broken brakes. At the end of the album, what remains is a deafening background noise, rather than an happy ending. During the listening to this album, probably no one would expect a different conclusion.