[Instruments Of Discipline, 2019]
Reclamation. Noise music crushes its own materials, grinds them through the blades of barely tolerable sounds, staples the chunks back together in possessed union. What you hate, what was stolen from common ownership, what you fear, what was thought to be lost – reach out, grasp it, take it back, display it. Espectra Negra has a chokehold on Nietzschean values again, tied up as they are in the muck of fascist thought.
For a bloody and barren affair, each section creases over the other with precision. Several tracks (Falling Into The Abyss, Technologies of Violence, Also Sprach Zarathustra) scrape through the speaker as inhaled gravel driven by static washes, the topsoil. The opener gleans intent from the crash and hum. Acid-sterilization of the palette. Not until the second track do the samples of groaning machines carrying out their obscure function introduce themselves. Each sample and section, filthy, packaged in clean production – crime scene evidence. Victim-voices are hunting fodder in the noise genre; they’re, again, reclaimed on The Children of God, mostly untouched and centered as statements. There’s no voyeur’s gaze. She lets them say their piece.
At the summit of the album, rustic strings clarify and stretch beneath the watershed before Negra introduces her voice into the final fold of the running time. She dictates without pageantry. She describes the scenes of torture on The Horror House with no cheek or pleasure. Lawyer’s facts. Witness statements. There was blood. I saw who did it.
The album closes with a self-defined reclamation of the words of Nietzsche uttered in Negra’s own diction – Nietzsche defined women harshly in his work with male-centeredness. Negra does sound dangerous, but she isn’t playing around. There’s a grim beauty to her monologue. She sounds done with philosophy even as she recites it. Kill it. Throw a handful of dirt on it.
For an album with this kind of title, the work comes across in contrast – tightly controlled, lacking clear narrative (what narrative is both clear and true?), and mean as hell. Death-industrial fans will drink it up. Harsh noise purists might yawn. Wake up and pay attention, dickhead. You might learn something.
Espectra Negra is a Mexico City-born artist with over 30 years of work in scenes across Latin America, Europe, and the USA. Her current solo project is based out of Berlin. See her website below for details.
https://www.discogs.com/Espectra-Negra-Tales-Of-Chaos/master/1649870
https://instrumentsofdiscipline.bandcamp.com/album/tales-of-chaos