CD Reviews

KTL

2 | Editions Mego

By SUSANNA BOLLE | May 22, 2007

3.0 Stars

This duo of guitarist Stephen O’Malley of Sunn0))) and Viennese digital noise musician Peter Rehberg (a/k/a Pita) was born when the two scored the soundtrack to a theatrical piece by French performance artist Gisèle Vienne and American novelist Dennis Cooper. Titled Kindertotenlieder (“Songs on the Death of Children”), the piece premiered this past March, but the musical project took on a life of its own. The duo’s KTL debut was a formidable marriage of heavy guitar drones and roiling, abrasive electronics. On their follow-up, O’Malley and Rehberg have upped the ante. Recorded in a 16th-century French manor house and a former abattoir, 2 begins in relative calm with the spare, fine-textured “Game,” all manipulated feedback and swirling, bell-like tones. The first funereal beats of “Theme,” however, lead to a slow, inexorable crescendo — a thunderous roar of processed organ and guitar that’s both shudderingly bleak and spine-tinglingly cathartic. The heaviest, blackest metal moment is “Abattoir,” a grinding guitar dirge. But the closer, the softly elegiac “Snow 2,” is no less ferocious in its stark beauty.

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Topics: CD Reviews , Entertainment, Musicals, Dennis Cooper

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