And after the deluge, SCH
'Music is the one incorporeal entrance into higher worlds of knowledge which comprehends mankind, but which mankind cannot comprehend.'
BEETHOVEN
Almost 12 months following on from the release of their perfect last album Eat This, Sarajevo’s SCH deliver a new crucial piece of work, entitled Deluge And After. The executive summary goes like this: this is an intimate, multi-layered, confident and, above all, honest and CONSCIOUS artefact, further affirmation of their track record, and yet another huge leap forward; considering SCH were always a few light years ahead of its surroundings, this easily places them on another planet altogether. Yep, it’s that good.
The exhibits then.
The album is called Deluge And After. After the deluge? And after the deluge? What beyond the deluge? Life after the deluge? And after the deluge - SCH? Like some sturdy insect which survives a universal nuclear war, this Sarajevo-based band demonstrates such resilience, longevity and power of regeneration and magnetism that there is no doubting its permanence following the inevitable, imminent, longed-for deluge; which is why this CD should be placed in a few time capsules, buried deep with a few mythic maps as guide to the spot, so that the surviving insects of the future may listen to it as they develop into people, in the essence sense. SCH of course is not of this time, in the same measure it is, and never mind the environment that spawned it. And to underline what’s been said many a time before, this environment isn’t really worthy of SCH. Maybe after the deluge then.
Furthermore, this digital bearer of sounds is naturally and carefully wrapped in yet another exceptional SCH package: a disturbingly beautiful combo of deep green and mauve shades, complete with slip-case, a package whose simplicity denotes confidence and strength of idea, as well as irreverence towards ‘likeability’, after all this is from another, far superior planet. SCH never serve just a music CD, but rather intermittently tender a sliver of higher consciousness and life, so their anti-design aesthetic comes as no surprise.
And at the heart of it...
Your player’s laser beam will first hit the opening ‘Near You’: a pulsating slow rhythm beating to the sound of a pure heart, out-of-this-world vocals, and a semi-traditional melody, straight from the book of lullabies of some lost people, now deep in the ocean’s bowels, or perhaps a lovely eulogy to the marriage of the sun and moon. Or something. The lilting is interrupted by an agitated-calm guitar, which stretches, springs and wails, ripping shaky life light from every binary block.
Relentlessly, heart continues to pulsate in 'Not Too Often', which starts off like the embodiment of a disturbed, contemplative lunar, pre-sleep state, suddenly spilling out, after a moment of conscious twisting, into a decisive moment of self-remembering and triumph over daydreams, while the thumping heart-bass ushers in a motoric guitar and waves of synth melodies, the very image of the sun rising, and the peace that brings.
The sun follows us on the road to the Maltese town of 'Imdina', where the trippy near krautrock almost analogue melody (played, not programmed) heralds the stylised vocals and the confident words telling the tale of a personal pilgrimage and cleansing. The simple yet mature and almost hymn-like melody (that’s hymn is in football chant more like), together with the guitar coda and the plink plonk synths which take us to some far off far eastern future land, gently brings us back to life.
From Imdina we drive at ‘130’ straight into another atmosphere, similar yet different, the explosion of accumulated regenerative pilgrim energy. This is the rhythm of an adrenalinised heart, wedding the brain, the body, the essence, feeling, and sensing. The four-to-the-floor is enveloped in a trancey carpet of sound that rises and rises around you and inside you, driving on and on and on, stopping now and then at stations called funky guitar, early Underground Resistance techno-jazz motifs and bubbling synth lines, and the sound of contemporary German techno a la Kompakt ili Kanzelramt. You can listen, and you can dance, uncommon.
Then it’s the colossal ’Long Night at Roxy’, certainly the ‘heart’ of the album, and a near 30-minute juggernaut of unfolding sound, from the seemingly simple archetypal electronic base into a delicately assembled infinity of wild vibrations, a mosaic of sound collages that spin the head into a dark ecstasy of the dancefloor. The interplay between the various layers of the track is very intuitive, so much so it’s hard to unpeel the coating (very rare in today’s quantised world), so that all you hear is the total sum, inviting and sucking you in like some sonic Bermuda triangle. Conceptualised as a fragment of a DJ set, '...Roxy' is Technics, E, lasers, sweaty bodies, smoke, Dervish-like dance rapture, and torn psychedelic guitar strings, a relentless set that storms on, despite the occasional indications the whole thing might just collapse at any moment, crashing into an earthquake of electronic thunder of bass and FX. This is some twisted out-there techno, built by a man both renaissance and cosmic.
The album closes with the threesome of 'Karim 1-3', set to the elegiac lyric of Darko Cvijanovic (credited with 3 out of the album’s 4 texts). A treated female vocal, like the echo of a breeze, flows over mono-synth loop, taking us down with it, sliding down on some giant, slippery spiral, going deep underground. ‘Karim 2’, built out of the same blocks and not so, is yet another, more disturbed in-between world, the spiral (now a big digger ripping into the earth) throwing us into the dark and unknowable world of ‘Karim 3’, before the sudden deadly silence hits us. The earth under us trembles, breaks and splits open, as though swallowing all our misery whole. Worthy of the subject matter.
The end.
In some ideal imaginary world, this album would be the soundtrack to our lives, but we may be content just to know that this space of ours can provide such objective music, far from the blind eyes of those who dwell here. But then his is music for the conscious elite (while being anything but elitist), and the others can die in their ignorance and a diet of local musical pap, the kind of crap that has us slamming every next CD into the toaster in sheer pitying frustration and disbelief in the face of such overwhelming unconscious and stupidly opportunistic arrogance as displayed by local knobshiner bands and drywank artists; fact: put them all together in a blender and the result wouldn’t come anywhere near this gem of an album. Armed with the latest SCH gem, you glance at the heap of useless and offensive local musical releases and the only thing you can think is: bah!
And if SCH inspires unease and discomfort, well where does it say that rock (in its cosmic, mythic sense) should be comfortable and easy? SCH is not sonic wallpaper for in-and-out dipping into while you thumb away on the Playstation, but objective and crucial music. This latest album is again a reminder that SCH’s sound is based both in the past, towards which it stands with equal respect and irreverence, as well as in the fantastic future, one in which people are whole and omnipotent. This future, if not quite within reach, is at least clearly intimated in their music. After the deluge, such a future may even be come to be, and then, its soundtrack will be ready in the shape of this and previous SCH releases. Best listened to in the dark, while you pray for this very future. Superhuman.
SCH – Deluge and after (Buybook 2005)
Contains:
Near You
Not Too Often
Imdina
130
Long Night at Roxy
Karim
Karim 2
Karim 3
Duration: A pleasant 78 minutes. Then press repeat.