Customer Reviews

Psychic Secession

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First when hearing Yellow swans you have to take all preconceived notions of music and throw it out the window. Its easy to pigeonhole what these people do as "noise", but it is so much more. There is layer upon layer of melodies being atonal or not. It starts with the most violent of tracks "True Union". Which is a hurricane of vibrations and feedback that finally swirls into "Psychic Secession. Psychic opens with a spoken work piece and mute beats slowly plodding beneath it. Which builds into intensity and leads to the most rhythmic track "I woke up". Layers of mechanical and organic drumming rising to the violent vocals that repeat: "I woke up to the end of electricity, I woke up outside of time. I woke up with my dreams in my life." The lyrics may seem mundane outside of the music, but put into context is quite riveting.

'Psychic Secession' is loud but somehow muted, with a powerfully visceral quality. There is a compelling synthesis between the electric and the electronic in its production. Tracks are propelled by very humanly produced percussive, drone and feedback tones, which are then subject to electronic treatment. This serves to create an alienated ambience in which feedback is deployed as a tool of precision. Sometimes brutal, sometimes fragile, Yellow Swans produce the kind of synaesthetic effect that leads one to talk about pictures painted with sound, or aural spaces sculpted to incite psychodramas. Yellow Swans produce music to take one on peculiar existential journeys that defy verbal exposition. Interesting stuff - like the Jesus and Mary Chain via Aphex Twin.