MorningHaze by Bzzzuwfarfewww
http://obsoletefuture.bandcamp.com/
- MorningHaze is one of the tracks on Obsolete Future's label compilation "House Of Mutes Vol. 1". Download above.-
Weedtemple.net
-Somehow I’m not very surprised that some of the most cosmic-faring, third eye opening music from the unwieldy named synth surfer Bzzzuwfarfewww (damn! is that an onomatopeia or something?) comes from Amsterdam. Because it seems that you really have to be one of the cloud people (wink wink, nudge nuge) to create this kind of pyramid drone music. MorningHaze is the kind of album that either fathoms hell or soars angelic, and it’s certaily psychedelic. With influences ranging from Klaus Schulze and Steve Hillage’s Rainbow Dome Music to Coil’s Time Machines and even Sunn O))), this is one hell of a trip through the music world. This time your spaceship of choice is the synthesizer. Enjoy the ride.-
AmbientExotica.com
-An artist name resembling the golden sun shining over a wondrous Dutch coppice, Bzzzuwfarfewww hails from Amsterdam and fathoms the apexes and cusps of hallucinatory synth music, softer Ambient funnels and gateways to moss-grown space-oriented tunes. His debut MorningHaze is self-released and available to fetch (name your price) and stream at Bandcamp. Four tracks made it onto this EP or mini album, all of them dedicated to the task at hand: depicting the morning melancholia in all its glory… not! Indeed, there are certain moirés and filters which seem partly contemplative, even a cautious elation is intertwined, but in lieu of worshipping these states, darker spirals, cascades and twisted passageways make up the majority of Bzzzuwfarfewww’s dioramas. The front artwork, meanwhile, does not need to beg for your attention, as its clever stylistic play with the peculiarities of 80’s video cassettes, 90’s Rave patterns, the millennial nihilism and this decade’s Vaporwave galore is mostly compatible with the particular sound waves found in MorningHaze. Obviously, the album is not fully enclosed in the Vaporwave capsule, even though the artist remains anonymous at the time of writing this review. More keen on mildly rotten robotic New Age cyberspaces than hyper-polished shopping malls filled with elevator muzak, Bzzzuwfarfewww has carved out a wee concept for his debut and asks the listener to move to the music, not in a physical sense but a virtually thought-provoking one by sequencing the thoughts and wishes with or without the help of hallucinations. I have taken the trip without the use of drugs (spoilsport!) and provide a meticulous look at all four tracks below.
Budum is the willfully emaciated and thinned out vestibule to the technicolor world of Bzzzuwfarfewww, letting the listener guess whether this track title is another play on onomatopoeia or a child-like pronunciation of the abyss, otherwise known as the, er, bottom. The earthen bottom is indeed inspected, a journey through the innermost pith initiated. The 8-bit blebs next to the buzzes of electric current are adamantly minimal, but after three minutes, the tempo is ever-increased until the evenly distributed vesicles resemble a fusillade of argentine shrapnel bullets, later on underlined by gyrating hi-hat beats and eerie whistles from another dimension. While it might seem to the reader that this has been experienced before and ever synth (hehe), Bzzzuwfarfewww’s pitch comprises a cohesive amalgamation of sine elements and cauterized coils. There is anything of simmering beauty in Budum, but the bent frequencies, the saltatory counterparts amid the rectilineal high voltage drone flumes as well as the interstitial interdependencies between sound, sustain and silence make this opener a faux-leftover of Machinefabriek’s Stroomtoon (2012) or Stroomtoon II (2013) respectively. Even at volume levels that match the voltage, Budum never sounds harsh, incisive or iniquitous, making the listening experience differ from its disk saw physiognomy. The following attraction is so important a destination that it is screamed at the passenger in big letters: ICEPALICE feels like a glacial mirage in the Arctic Zone, but instead of majestic ice floes, a vertiginous pointillism of polka dots, mucoid flecks and aqueous bubbles twirls around a progressive Synth Pop placenta whose brightly colored surface inherits the reflective nature of disco balls in tandem with helixes of hedonism. Paradoxically vivacious yet hued in darkness, the second half of ICEPALICE gets rid of the centroid iridescence of glitz for a moment and underlines the percussive tohubohu supercharged with industrial polyrhythms and their brazen rhizomes before the dripping cyber faucet’s holiday comes to a halt.
Up next is Morninghaze 6114, an unexpectedly threnodic capsule of retrogression and tumular billows of nostalgia. Fir-green blobs of polyphony chuggle in adjacency to coruscating synth scintillae and beguiling rotors of shifting aggregate phases which morph from etiolated corporeality over ophidian liquids to a gaseous fugacity. This track seemingly tumbles along and schleps itself forward all too unwillingly. The interim result, however, is no mere doldrums but a heterodox influx of sylvan blotches. Partaking partying particles part partially, cyber wind gusts ameliorate the second half before an encore of the beginning lets the morning charade come full circle. Like an orbital with intercrossing junctions and streamlined lanes, the human eye – in this case: ear – is too untrained to absorb the positive linearity even in the outermost peripheries of Morninghaze 6114, but it can be argued that, despite the occasional turmoil, this third track features an Ambient gestalt, an emphasis on alluvial melancholy and the antipode to every slugabed: the getouttabed. But maybe it doesn’t need to come down to this as of yet, at least not if I decipher the last three letters in the finale called Bzzzuwfarfewww-zzz. It may well be that the mysterious producer wants the listener to submerge into bolstered cushions and allow him or her to snooz(zzz)e for a little while. Or maybe not. As it turns out, Bzzzuwfarfewww-zzz is a horribly desiccate wasteland of Space Ambient glitters, infaust dark matter hellions and antediluvian synth mechanisms that even predate the Space-Age era. Buzzing, sawing, traversing and notching through the apocalyptic superstructure, this recalcitrant sesquipedalian lets a mildly hypnotic lead melody forcefully clash with the girdling mélange of sawtooth tails and their retinues of ashen aftertastes. Marrying the spectral insinuations of the opener with an archetypical morning’s inappetency as previously depicted in the third track Morninghaze 6114, this brutish denouement of over 13+ minutes diminishes the color range, appears in hatched gowns and exchanges an epicurean lucency for jejune vertebrae. Time to wake up.
MorningHaze does live up to its title approximately 50% of its runtime, considering the societal denotation of the concept that is a typical morning. Pondering, reflecting, contemplating, even the will to change one’s whole life while looking at the mirror, and so on. However, there are also two additional columns or ingredients embroidered in the endemics Bzzzuwfarfewww has created here. One consists of the titular haze and its milky, potentially mediating and glorifying mellifluousness and the function to mellow down or straighten the jagged prongs, scything razors and frantic splinters. What a coincidence, as all of these parts turn out to be the third important inclusion of the intrinsic tapestry. Shuttling between rufescent orbits, dark whorls and cosmic crescent crystals, MorningHaze is, I believe, mostly about these noisier, darker structures, i.e. the very structures that remain unmentioned in the title… and I have not even mentioned the glaring front artwork in this regard and its paradisiac patterns of VHS memorabilia and Rave reels. Bzzzuwfarfewww’s debut is torn between the elements, almost torn apart by the contradictive antagonistic forces, but the Amsterdam-based artist knows a thing or two about the correct balancing of noise and euphony. Naturally, one man’s correctness is another man’s audacity, but in regard to its own coherence and ragged flow, MorningHaze is a skillful debut and an echopraxia of the time when you could count the overarching bits on both hands. Fans of the hazier parts with glacial interstitions and liquedous serpentines might check out the centroid tracks ICEPALICE and Morninghaze 6114, whereas the debut’s outer shell is driven by murkiness and scissoring sparks. A contradiction? You gotta listen to understand. As usual.-
Tracklist
| 1. | Budum | 14:07 |
| 2. | Morninghaze 6114 | 6:35 |
| 3. | ICEPALICE | 6:35 |
| 4. | Bzzzuwfarfewww-zzz | 14:07 |
