Gandrange by Sylvgheist Maëlström

“If the first meaning of domination consists in the necessity for an agent to pass through another to access his object of desire, then obviously the wage relationship is a relationship of domination.”

With his 2022 HANDS album, a fruit of four years, SYLVGHEIST MAËLSTRÖM, tackles the core subject of his artistic endeavours - the cyclical nature of catastrophic phenomena as well as the inevitability of destruction, the inexorable nature of death and disintegration. These are processed in his creations as an architect, a painter, and a music producer who has garnered considerable praise for his progressive approach at electronic music, bringing together the profound and the enjoyable. “Gandrange” is nothing less than a valuable dual purpose weapon, offering high class electronica, coupled with the possibility of immersion into existential questions of political nature.

Destruction of the environment is the magnification of the destruction of the intimate: The musical portrayal is a form of idleness experienced in the face of what cannot be mastered. The same is true for the destruction of dignity by the leeches of neo-liberal rule, as represented in the scandal surrounding the Gandrange steel site, where workers believed in a common goal, but were laid off for the most base of reasons – money. For SYLVGHEIST MAËLSTRÖM, this represents said image of the destruction of intimate, in the reflection of his own personal history.

“Gandrange” starts with Suffocation, recorded in 2020 at the Audiotrauma festival in Prague, one of the last big things to happen before the Covid-19 pandemic. The album oscillates between raw and harrowing industrial flavours, like the title track which brings together scraping distortion, a simple rhythm and floating organ sounds, the contorted “Attrition” or the minimal “Verena” on the on hand side, and more beat-heavy material like the acidic “Gloria Victis”, electro banger “Florange” or the stacked amens of “SARS-CoV-2”. Actually some of these might qualify for club use by more adventurous DJs indeed, but the main quality of “Gandrange” is the exquisite sound design coupled with the diversity and dynamics of the music presented. Each track is a little world to discover, a moment of elation, a statement against the immoral and the destructive.