Quicksand
Manic Compression

Take music and strip it of its beauty. Strip it of the beauty that would be normal and reassuring to expect from it, until only the skeleton is left, the skeletal framework that underlies it. A work of nullification, of renunciation, of simplification, that leads to the nakedness of the pure idea, of the idea that needs no other motivation to exist than its own existence. Strip music.
And, after this "desert making", take the skeleton of music and adorn it again, but this time adding garlands that no one else has ever hung before, giving music a new and strange beauty. It is the beauty of the purest stream of consciousness, the flow of emotions in their least mediated form, without explanations and without clichés, just as they are, and it is not a reassuring beauty.
Teach music new paths along which to unravel, teach music not to flow in just one direction, from the beginning to the end of the song, but to expand in every possible direction, like a spider. Teach music to be a spider.

"Death is a straight process".

The sound world in which Quicksand takes us is totally abstract, but at the same time physical. It is physical because the guitars have gargantuan distortions that can cut like razors; because the rhythm digs a hole in your brain and, once inside, it vibrates it through resonance; because the lowest frequencies massage your belly while the highs scrape away your skin as if you were sliding on a grater. But rock, if it ever resided here, stops at this.
And it is abstract because there are no holds for the listener. All the elements that traditionally identify the anatomy of a song are missing. There are no guitar riffs; the choruses, if present, are almost never identifiable within the track; the typically rock and metal concept of "the solo moment" is absolutely abolished. This does not mean that the music is chaotic, far from it. The songs are built in a rigorous and geometric manner, but Quicksand finds their order, always present, in an absolutely personal way, with no debt to what are the unspoken "rules" of rock music. There is no blues, no jazz, no rock, or soul, or metal in this record, no trace of what have always been, at various levels, the typical influences to which almost every artist owes something. There is only Quicksand's music, which flows from the hands of these four guys as if they had learned to play their respective instruments without ever having heard another's record in their lives, but only their sensations. Their music starts from abstract bases, somewhat like it did, in an aggressive and hardcore key, for that of Gorilla Biscuit. Quicksand, born from their ashes, constitute its most cerebral evolution.

Post-Hardcore, simplement.

The solos, when there are any, are short and nervous; the voice is less "song" and more instrument, with its asyntactic and fragmented phrasing, and does not relegates the rest of the music to the rank of its simple accompaniment, but merges with it, placing itself at the same level of importance and sharing its fate. The drums build unusual accents in unusual ways (who said a drum roll must necessarily be on the toms and not, for example, on the hi-hat?), becoming also an instrument of expression rather than simply limiting itself to "keeping time" and possibly emphasizing breaks and changes. In a record like this, even a guitar feedback, the distracted glide of a pick scraping the strings, the discharges produced by the jack plugging into the bass become music, when merged with a wall of compact distortions, disciplined by a clockwork-like drum, unraveled by a voice suspended in the void.

It is music that speaks of incommunicability, of being imprisoned in the cage of one's own brain, in the company of one's mind's ghosts. Of when one thinks they are close but in reality they do not know each other. What Joy Division whispered, Quicksand shouts.

An enormous and forgotten album, which is a punch in the stomach but also the puff of color (gray) of an almost dry marker...