Songs of Love and Decay- Album Overview

Damaged English Membership: Songs of Love and Decay

(Dekmental)

Out Now

DL  | LP (Bandcamp)

On Songs of Love and Decay, not solely does Oliver Ho, aka Damaged English Membership, reach evoking the spirit of Juan Mendez, however by baring his chest between noise and kind, escapes the usually standard weight of reminiscence by pushing his machine-breed of techno occultism into the screaming coronary heart of the up to date age. Interview and Overview by Ryan Walker.

One thing being about somebody is totally different from one thing being created within the reminiscence of them. An allusion to their reverential spectre. The distinction at first look may not be that important, but the excellence between dedicating one thing, say…a brand new album, say…one known as Songs of Love and Decay by Damaged English Membership, an album on Dekmantel UFO label the place their stuff-of-legend stage in Amsterdam turns into a stuff-of-legend LP collection, an album devoted to the reminiscence of somebody, say…Juan Mendez, aka Silent Servant, and easily making an album about them, is bigger than you would possibly assume.

For the spirit of somebody, a powerful slap of thunder imbuing the panorama with their insurmountable presence and foreboding affect in the end overrides merely writing an album about somebody – the mechanics of their self-destructive way of life, the hanger-on heartbreaks, their traumatic childhood, their profession triumphs – which, even when discussing somebody similar to the enormous that’s Juan Mendez, would seem a moderately trite and underwhelming exercise.
AARelatively, the act of evoking his aura, guided by his incorporeal authority, the artwork of conjuring up and channelling his impact-crater power, is a much more endearing technique of not simply monumentalising a pioneering determine at the hours of darkness caverns of snarling techno and the collective ripples that surrounds it, however a extra creatively stimulating apply of endowing the work at hand with nothing besides ribcage-rattling requiems for the up to date age of the best calibre.

The spectral presence of the late Juan Mendez, comrade and collaborator for nearly anybody in close-knit, brooding techno circles bleeding by a caustic, post-punk filter, pulsates by the file. Because it did with Sandwell District’s Finish Beginnings, launched this yr, that includes a sleeve designed by Mendez. Songs of Love and Decay roughly marks the last decade since Damaged English Membership debuted on Jealous God, a label launched by Karl O’Connor, Mendez and James Ruskin in 2013.
AA”Sure, this album does mark round 10 years since I debuted my first launch on his label, it was such a potent solution to start this journey, these first data had been actually vital for me to go looking and discover my sound, to search out the soul of the music,’’ says Ho. ‘’We first met in LA within the late 90s, my brother lived there so I’d spend time hanging on the market, I performed just a few reveals and ultimately met Juan, and did a remix for him, that was the start of the connection, we might keep in contact, and chat about obscure bands and images and stuff, we all the time had a lot to talk about, our pursuits had been very various and we felt that music, artwork, movies, images had been all a associated and all an enormous affect on our artistic course of.
AA”The final time we spoke was at Tresor in Berlin, I noticed him and his spouse, it was solely 2 months later that they each handed away, it’s troublesome to place into phrases, the shock and unhappiness.’’

There’s an undercurrent of melancholy there sure, a weak contact of sorrow to enrich the bone-gnawing brutality that penetrates every part to its bloody axis, however with the chimera that was Mendez, a reminiscence maneuvering all through the file, which really, represents one thing broader than the intricacies of 1 man’s life and the implications of his loss of life, we’re removed from unhappiness, removed from remorse. To say that …Love and Decay is a ‘unhappy’ album could be a grave injustice to the work at hand. This album isn’t even about him. It’s about a lot extra. As he would’ve needed, the prodigal son (certainly one of many prodigal little kids) takes his profession by the horns and drives it into the route he so chooses. Conformity, in spite of everything, is cowardice. Mendez understood that. Ho understands that, too.

The White Rats trilogy, a saga which began in 2018 and concluded in 2021, established Ho as greater than a techno-punk producer however an artist who simply so occurs to make use of the techno medium as an appropriate vessel to hold the message alongside. A step or two onward, and sideways from the concentrated, conceptual concepts articulated inside the formidable L.I.E.S trilogy launch, or his final standalone file Synthetic Animals, a much less overtly political rhetoric however nonetheless a densely layered file, blooming with narratives that take into account the fraught interaction between people, nature and expertise; that is an album of simply as a lot white-knuckle emotional gravitas as these releases.
AABut, the first focus right here is on the thought of fabricating solitudinous secure havens within the form of songs, that when compounded collectively, create the overarching narrative of the album. The album kind as a kind of interface, a approach of dealing with the slew of chaotic horrors that dominate each second of each broadcast, each inch of accessible house – on-line, and within the thoughts, an inescapable avalanche. If maybe we create artwork, or make it customized to familiarise itself with its energy, we would have an opportunity of remaining secure within the information {that a} connection to a set of tracks can present a brief antidote to no matter could also be ready to strike.
AA”White Rats was very a lot a set of concepts. It began across the time of Brexit and the rise of right-wing teams, and the best way these societies had been turning into extra fragmented, and other people had been turning into politically tribal, turning into extra excessive of their beliefs. With this present album, I needed to take the sound into a much bigger space, push the sounds into heavier and much more trendy sonic territory. The music guides the best way, however there are such a lot of concepts going by my thoughts whereas I’m engaged on music, so these narratives seep into the method. This album was about processing emotion by a type of dream course of, permitting my unconscious to create worlds that this music inhabited.
AA”I had collected various tracks that had been all relating to one another, that they had a brutal melancholy, some had been fairly experimental and others had been very pure membership tracks, however all of them felt like there was connection, when this begins to occur its time to begin enthusiastic about forming an album, then the thought of the general theme got here into focus. The music leads the best way, I attempt to be a servant of the music, let it information me.’’

A foreboding climax of car-crunching electronics leads us to A Shallow Lake. A tune that happened first together with Pacific Island Kill and Night time Fall, it ignites a flare of vapour trails melodically lingers within the skies of the thoughts, always hovering, immovable and nonetheless while a progressively awakening machine graphically punctuates the stillness of the unnerving smog in a cacophony, visceral discharge of ball bearings and nail bombs. Subsequent, Crawling sees a dystopian techno pulse cruise alongside a path fully of its personal making, joined by a spectrum of unsettling atmospheric textures shifting to their very own unyielding, rhythmic mechanism- a cracking whip peeling the pores and skin off one’s shoulders as if it was plaster on a decaying wall, an ominous choreography of cavernous clockwork and physique music groove.
AAPray, kneel, dream, kill, once more. A rallying cry commenting on the cyclical equipment that underpins every part in trendy life, echoed out of 1 unconscious zone and into one other by Ho, hollering this profound maxim into the throng of an immense, orgasmic techno dirge, Demise Cult connects to this chorus rising out of the darkish waves, the deep areas, the recommendations of dormancy syncopated to a pulsating thrust of flesh and bone, human and machine. As two minutes twists into the third, the heartbeat quickens, the rhythm takes maintain, there is no such thing as a air, no escape, however lookup for lengthy sufficient, and preserve trying, for a brigade of melodies soften objects start to buckle beneath the extraordinary gaze of unimaginable centigrade, taut scourge of muscular, mutant EBM energy gyrates into the ghostly jaws of a pitch-black void.

Sacred Sacrifice, Vessel of Pores and skin, Prisoner, though we don’t want vocals to determine some kind of story to the album, Ho’s voice helps conjure up a visible of a scene, a visceral fragment snatched from a broader panorama injected into the useful electronics of what he does. One thing ritualistic. A burial. A rebirth. Is there a story to what Damaged English Membership does? Is the narrative on this file Mendez or one thing else?
AA”The narrative is all the time vital for me within the artistic course of, it helps to create dynamics and a type of terrain or panorama over which the music drifts, like some type of sonic climate. Lyrics are fairly vital within the artistic course of; generally they get used, and generally there are lyrics to instrumental tracks that by no means get used, however are vital for me to know the place the music is coming from.
AA”The album is just not about Juan, however it’s devoted to his reminiscence; it felt vital to do that,” Ho explains. ”The album was exploring concepts of mortality, and a stage of my life the place I used to be trying into the duality of life, drive and kind, life and loss of life, love and decay. The thought of acceptance, that pleasure and unhappiness are a part of the identical expertise, that creation and destruction are a part of a single drive. The homage revealed itself at a later stage, it felt proper to do that, essentially the most significant solution to categorical this loss.’’

The thought of a territory on prime of which the music visits, devours, after which exits is a palpable characteristic all through. We’re made to really feel like we’re standing on the foot of a large monolith, backed towards the partitions of some towering monument. The physicality of what Damaged English Membership does is a dimension to the music that we can not ignore, nor escape. The extra we run from it, the extra it reaches for us, and sucks us again into the centre of wherever it so pleases to entertain.
AASadomasochistic, supernatural, like a pre-Dare Human League hung above a vat of hydrochloric acid, Vessel of Pores and skin leans heavy on the club-equipped avenue sounds keys while additionally unafraid to enrich its steamy, stiff grind with a heady dose of soundtrack drama and Chilly Conflict paranoia. Ho’s vocals are sparse – shadows of strangers flickering out and in of focus, as flints of quick sparks often illuminate a wasteland of warehouse yards that haven’t been visited in years. However the phrases we establish are honest.
AASubsequent, Night time Fall is a machine brawl of thick minimize techno beats of primordial energy summoned up by sheets of metal and slabs of concrete to wreak havoc on the world they’re greeted with. Clouds of cellophane synthesisers, dazed in reverie, stretch out with the solar struggling to remain afloat behind it. Tappings and trappings of intoxicating electronics dance atop the blockades of brutal constructions beneath.

Demise and Leisure, Love and Decay, a balancing act, or an try to hook up with the steadiness between heady dancefloor pump, ionised industrial abrasion and expansive, cinematic transcendence, between this world and one other, is vital within the Damaged English Membership lexicon. It retains the work’s momentum future-facing proper, retains testimony free from being superficial and trite, retains the stylistic shifts dialled into the correct quantity of retro, and the correct quantity zero, the correct quantity now, and the correct quantity of the peripheral wilderness that wracks the work into extra experimental, metallurgical extremes. Stability, sonically and philosophically talking, a mediating perspective shared by all worlds, a knot in want of untying to set us free, or tightening till we will’t breathe, and essential all the time to take care of an genuine allegiance to expressing, exhausting ambition, with out the expense of exploiting the artistic efforts of others, is what Damaged English Membership ship.
AA”I attempt to ignore stuff that doesn’t curiosity me, or stuff that’s shallow and boring. I don’t need to waste my power on hating stuff, it’s too poisonous. I really fairly admire stuff that’s actually retro; the dedication to an concept must be 100% to realize that. I’m all the time shifting the place I’m trying, so I’m by no means too distracted by a single music scene; there’s a lot on the market to delve into. I like a lot of the techno being made proper now, however there’s additionally nice metallic stuff, nice dub, hardcore punk and jazz. ‘’Just lately,” Ho says, “I’ve been fairly fascinated by a noise artist known as Vomir, the stuff he makes is pure industrial noise, like Merzbow, there’s nearly a philosophy to his stuff. A type of nihilistic nirvana.’’

This album, a nihilistic nirvana of one other form, is a fierce spectrum that encapsulates a concentrated tangent of all of the types that Ho has experimented with, and mastered up to now. From extra experimental items to tracks that reload the dancefloor, all of them are linked collectively by what Ho deems ‘’an environment and depth of sound,’’ enabling the tracks to float and dart, into and away from, particular stretches of house, frames of exercise they really feel the necessity to compelled sufficient to invade, imbuing them with their very own distinctive, useful groove.
AA‘’I’ve sure sounds and tones that I’m interested in, drones, crackles, metallic sounds, these are evocative for me, I’m trying to find these sounds on a regular basis, it doesn’t matter how they get made although, I take advantage of synths, guitars, samples, audio recordings, something and every part is a supply of sound. I work in a collage approach, laying sound down like I’m creating a picture. I usually method the music prefer it’s a scene inside a movie.
AA“I needed to make one thing that was clearly techno, but in addition had fringes that had been seeping into different issues, one thing that’s each pure stable and dissolving, that’s attention-grabbing to me. I used to be studying a e-book known as Hope, Religion and Carnage by Nick Cave. It appeared to reflect issues that had been turning into vital in my life, concepts about creativity and mortality, for me, it was additionally about brutality and melancholy.
AA”I take heed to principally loss of life metallic, quite a lot of new stuff. It’s the stress that I like. I feel that perhaps I used to be making an attempt to make a techno album that had the identical compressed sound stress of a metallic album. I by no means have guidelines, solely instructions I need to pursue. I needed to let all these items take me in direction of one thing, one thing that ended up being this album.’’

From Juan Mendez or Karl O’Connor or Hayden Payne or Justin Broadrick or Mick Harris or Helena Hauff or Ron Morelli or Dominick Fernow- there’s a case to be made for audiences confidently recognising their names and, because the proponents of a type of bleeding-edge, mutant machine electronica that might combust at any given second but stubbornly continues to churn, use them as a reasonably stable barometer for some bloody good machine-music dirge about to be skilled in artists which might be, in some methods greater than others, minimize from the identical fabric, or not less than come to be begrudgingly linked by way of default in later life. The varied break up releases and collabs (Violence and Divinity), the facet tasks (Sluggish White Fall, Life Burial), the file labels (Cititrax), all feed into this concept that the tapestry is the work of many finely positioned stitches at play, moderately than the results of one particular person.
AAThe scene has its rebels, its exiles, its opinionated agitators, however that’s an excellent factor. Extra music must be made, and digression, as a lot as connection, can spare that yet-to-be-made music being diluted as a consequence of scene-critiqued compromise or techno-experts in diehard viewers factions. A few of which come nearer to advocating on-line aerobics courses than experiments with menacing electronica. However nonetheless, encouragement and expertise should be humbling.
AA”I’ve folks I relate to as artists, there may be positively a gaggle of individuals the place you possibly can see quite a lot of connections, and there are some related concepts being pursued. That is actually inspiring to me, to have the ability to see what I’m doing in a bigger approach, as a part of one thing greater than simply myself,’’ says Ho. ”I’ve my obsessions and I allow them to information me, they take me to the lake to drink from, I allow them to nourish me. I’m all the time searching for methods to dream, to dream new worlds and areas, I attempt to let all of the issues that encourage me seep into me as an artist, to embody all these items.
AA””I have no concept how I’m seen or don’t have a view on how I see myself actually, that’s for different folks to do. I’m principally consumed with my very own journey as an artist. How I can evolve, and what are the issues that I need to examine.”

Stable one second, but disintegrating the subsequent, like being thrown towards a sizzling wall of venomous acid-inflected electronics, wading by swamps of sizzling oil, pits of treacle and wheels of metal tooth, Pacific Island Metal slices towards the silence, in flip inflicting it to swell, a surging seige engine strikes the centre of the chest, and once more, and once more. As if incoming from one other dimension, urgent towards the floor of our personal, inflicting mounds of black and blue to erupt like some temporal bleed. Ho’s ripped transmissions bark rhythmically as a thud of gurgling drones, a development of ethereal synthscapes and fizzles of fucked-up noise creates a temper each enchantingly wealthy in sensory element, while additionally being grotesquely perturbing in how flesh melts towards, and meshes into, the machine world earlier than our very eyes.
AAWith a beat devastating the battlefield it descends into, Misplaced Gods additionally hones into the edges of Ho’s musical mindset knowledgeable by cinema and the symbiosis of sound and imaginative and prescient to create an all-engulfing second, the meticulousness of how an album begins, to the place it will definitely finally ends up, isn’t too dissimilar to how a director or author would kind out and redraft a script for a movie – scrawling in its margins, reducing and chopping, rewording and rearranging, erratically desperate to make sense of what they’re dropping sleep over at night time; the web page as a chunk of dwelling, respiratory thought-process in movement. ”I can generally begin with a word on my telephone, up to now I’d write out my songs in phrases, describing how I needed the observe to sound. I’d write out the complete album as an outline.’’

We are able to think about a scene of disturbing motion, a warfare projected towards a veil as its disorienting sample of wings, a flapping propeller snapping backwards and forwards earlier than a hideous rupture dissolves every part right into a spool of screaming digital glitches. After it, but on the different finish of the spectrum, Prisoner proceeds to punch by the core of wherever it needs to.
AAElsewhere, whereas Misplaced Gods or Pacific Island Kill, all stark modernist angles scarred by the filth that gathers round them, erect a extra cerebral, however no much less caustic collection of movement image constructions, Prisoner is an unrelenting powerhouse of darkish, rave-edged techno. Frantic palpitations lap us up in its everlasting spell. Metallic claps pang within the distance, a low-rumbling motor scrapes away beneath a effervescent acid alarm, a hi-hat sample sputters as a synapse-snapping laser stares all through the motion. The bass drum briefly disappears, solely intensifying the ominous, analogue sweatbox, nearly inflicting entire apertures to look in a distant equator.

There’s as a lot Clock DVA and Cabaret Voltaire in Ho’s blood in addition to roots in tribal 90s techno and synthwave. Though simply Ho on the controls, Damaged English Membership might be seen by the filter of collective enter, a set of conditions established and principally related to how bands would ordinarily function – a rehearsal, a recording, a dwell gig, and so on, that give the looks of a number of minds and our bodies at work.
AAAll of it appears to function on that early industrial, DIY electronics degree, as a lot as being plugged into the heartbeat of techno music, as a lot as Throbbing Gristle had been extra about industrial music, however the varied connotations that got here with being a religious disciple of the band, as a lot indebt to what they mirrored concerning the perils of existence in the event that they dare to peek behind the veil with them and the vary of pioneering sounds they introduced into public information, or not less than the information so far as the communicative radius of people who had been of their shut social circles or had them on their radar, by their obsessive explorations with esoteric electronics, unique dissemination mediums and excessive music. Ho arguably has introduced this concept into the up to date techno-loving age. A simulation of guitar, bass, and drums, particularly on his earlier releases, such because the Jealous God debut, or the Scars EP.
AA”Oh, positively, I like a lot of that early industrial music like Cabaret Voltaire, TG, Coil, Whitehouse. These bands are an enormous affect, together with metallic stuff like Napalm Demise, Slayer and SunnO))).
AA”There is a feral wild spirit in early English digital music that influenced loads, however I needed to take this and make it my very own, and to modernise it. There are concepts of historic pagan stuff that runs by quite a lot of Coil, which has fed into my music too. I dwell close to some highly effective historic non secular websites like Avebury and Stone Henge.”

From the tempestuous, obtrusive hound of his debut, Suburban Searching, to follow-ups The English Seashore and Myths of Metal and Concrete, a sure dystopian occultism has a robust maintain on Ho’s outlook. Averbury and Stone Henge have an unconscious, umbilical connection to Ho. They hang-out his grounds. They spike the lens by which he perceives actuality and unfold themselves all through his portrayal of subcultural wastelands, the agricultural non-places, and inform the landscapes evoked all through the tunes. ”The occult has all the time been a supply of inspiration to me. The occult is basically a collective time period for various types of non secular/psychological philosophy, together with alchemy, pagan nature religions and in a extra trendy sense, chaos magick. Lots of these concepts place the person and their creativeness as a central drive of creation and an lively drive. They place artwork and science as an equal pair.
AA”In trendy chaos magick, the person and the act of creativity is seen as a central a part of making actuality. These concepts are very potent to me, they usually encourage me as an artist and as a human. The concepts additionally don’t have the dogma that organised religions do, as they converse in a way more poetic approach, and the language is far more esoteric. The occult is a way more versatile and open solution to navigate non secular and metaphysical concepts.
AA”The thought of location as narrative has all the time been vital in my artistic course of, with Suburban Searching and The English Seashore, these concepts had been very concrete. Just lately, I’ve moved to the Cotswolds and have become influenced by the traditional significance of non secular stone websites, particularly Avebury. The stone websites symbolize one thing very highly effective to me, they symbolize the human thoughts and its need to attach the land to the sky, to attach the thoughts to the universe, to see connections. Additionally they symbolize the need to create, to position artwork into the world, to alter the world by creativeness. They appear to retailer this historic power inside them, they resonate with one thing very primal.
AA”I lately recorded an album known as A Circle In Stone beneath my VEIL identify, it was immediately impressed by Avebury, I needed to permit the stones to speak to me of their silent historic voice, and I’d translate their secrets and techniques into sound and music.”

Sacred Sacrifice is a deep tissue therapeutic massage of sensory-enveloping atmosphere. A translation of secrets and techniques. A voice out of silence. Ho’s voice is caught floating throughout the view, the physique elsewhere, suspended between areas, the rat bait containers, the the galvanised metallic garbage bins, the deserted vehicles, the Neolithic constructions eroded into shapeless slabs, interrupted solely by a grumbling detonation of bass filth, a drop of bowel-obliterating gravity, a wailing synth cracking a canvas of ice aside. Ghost, in the meantime, is an equally eerie tour of rogue techno, resounding warbles of meaty, cracked leather-clad bass pads discovering deep satisfaction in fisting by a tunnel of sludge caught to all facets of the rim. Piss, petrol, still-burning damp firewood outlining the nowhere backroads eternally unfurling into the longer term and the previous, The Occult Physique, a suitably dramatic exit to the file, fees at us with tribal burst of noise, heavy-breathing beats breach by a manic shrapnel blast of burning electro swoops making an attempt to unstick themselves from a strip of effervescent adhesive.

After greater than a decade, nonetheless an ever-restless artist, the previous pouring into the longer term, the longer term informing the instructions of the current, all the time curiously bent on breaking the enamelled mould of custom, but by no means dropping sight of the fierce spirit that possesses, that twists out the thematic and stylistic extremes at both facet of the spectrum, that teases sabotaging steadiness as a technique to strengthen the nice magnificence that arises when it will definitely returns to it’s rightful strike; simply the place does Oliver see his new album sit within the physique of labor?
AA”It’s troublesome to speak about it in such an goal approach,” he feedback, ”I actually do love the album, a lot of what’s occurring on it excites me, and provides me concepts the place to go sooner or later. I’ve an concept for my subsequent album already. It will likely be fairly totally different. I feel that, in a roundabout way, this album was a approach of claiming goodbye to among the stylistic sounds and themes which have grow to be related to Damaged English Membership. A closing of a ten-year chapter. The subsequent chapter might be someplace that’s undeniably Damaged English Membership, however coming into into a brand new section on the similar time.”

Now, although, take into account Songs of Love and Decay his definitive jackknifing.

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Damaged English Membership| Bandcamp

Dekmantel | Web site 

Ryan Walker | Louder Than Conflict