Vampire Rodents
Clockseed

LA RECENSIONE

It is a perverse seed that grows inside your stomach. Rage, blinding pain.
Intermittent impulses, bursts of electricity that disrupt the mind.
Clockseed is a clear vision, an indecipherable and clear fresco, a deafening hallucination. Ideas that were once scattered aimlessly for miles and miles are now compact and cataloged; compressed into sound artifacts of astonishing density.

It is a game, a roundabout for children. An innocent fairy tale that turns into a nightmare.

Daniel Vahnke, guitarist as well as a crazy and methodical sampler, still wears elusive clothes. The Vampire Rodents are an ambiguous, undefinable, ectoplasmic entity. Rodents that run noisily in the walls (remember H.P. Lovecraft?), you think you pinpoint their position but you deceive yourself... It’s a hide-and-seek game again, the cards on the table constantly change.

Unrestrained creativity, uninhibited fantasies, genius that drinks from an unhealthy source. Rigorous eccentricity applied to a frantic cut-and-paste.

The rhythm is incessantly marked by drum machines, disorienting noise in the foreground. Pre-programmed machines that beat constantly, cloud the mind, and cruelly keep the attention threshold high. Violence: how to combine the coarse ferocity of Big Black and the lascivious rhythm of certain Hip-Hop. Machine gun bursts in the chest, unexpected melodic swerves, heavy-metal missiles exploding without warning.

Vahnke’s guitar sound is sharp, the incursions of violins and flutes threatening. It is difficult to identify the distinctive mark of this grandiloquent and hermetic music. There are many collaborations: about twenty artists from the industrial/rap world lend their voices and contribute to the lyrics. Another device to disorient the listener, the Cartesian axes continuously change direction and position. Awe.

It is music for surgeons: analyze, decompose, reconstruct, cut, tie, destroy, create. The compositions are fragmentary and cerebral symphonies, orchestrations of samples obtained from a necrophiliac collection, flesh ghosts. It is as if Foetus played the role of a claustrophobic avant-gardist, while Chrome plays free-jazz and twelve-tone classical in his living room; the Residents have finally removed their masks, revealing their horrifying and alien faces.

1995: 68 minutes of terrifying and magnificent music, infected. You will not heal easily.