Much of Milwaukee artist Climax Denial’s previous work has drawn heavily from that fetish tinged sleaze aesthetic that has been prevalent in the genre since its inception decades ago. However, divorced of all that, Dehumanizing Environments is a complex, varied work that emphasizes both disorder and structure, coming together in a nuanced, diverse approach that results in a high water mark for aggressive electronic music.
Climax Denial’s harsh predilections are never far away on Dehumanizing Environments, of course.Distortion, belligerent analog electronics and a sense of unpleasant darkness pervades through all four of these pieces.Those features do not define the record though, which is exactly why it is so commendable."The Womb as Vestibule" may open the album with a deep rumble and a synth passage with all the subtlety of a buzzsaw, yet significant depth lurks around the harshness.Icy tones pass through with a sense of melody, and through the harshness there lies open passages and an overall song-like approachof structure and composition.
The following "Fingering Dead Ashes as Evidence" may have a more crude title, but the music is the opposite.Combining rumbling low end and less abrasive mid-range passages of electronics, melodic sweeps drift in an out over the noisier moments.CD continues expanding and evolving the sound, blending beautiful tones with ugly noise, building to a heavier, denser conclusion.The lighter synths that introduce "Morning Following Dried Blood" make for a bit of a false start, as harsher passages are added.Between the overall dark and dour mood and violent, stuttering electronics, the piece is an unsettling, yet extremely captivating.
The penultimate piece, "Environments for Paranoid Necrotic Masturbation", besides sounding like a Carcass b-side, is the already strong album's high point.Glassy, vibrating drones set the stage, along with an extremely loud bass-heavy passage that is physically intense, testing the limits of any good subwoofer.Vocals appear for the first (and only, as best as I can tell) time on the album, and rather than the expected violent and processed screaming it is instead calm and spoken.While the effects render the actual words nearly impossible to decipher, it is that calmness that makes them all the more disturbing. This small snippet of humanity, lurking behind and orchestrating all the bleakness and darkness that surrounds the album, makes it all the more terrifying.
Given the paraphilliac subject matter and sense of pervading malignance throughout Dehumanizing Environments, the more open moments conjure a greater sense sense of impending doom or tension than any sort of peaceful release.But rather than being an album of rote distortion and canned violence, CD crafts a more diverse approach and actually composes, rather than just blurting out guitar pedal blasts of noise.This unexpected depth, coupled with the unsettling overall mood, comes together as an exceptionally strong record.
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