Kreng is Belgian sound sculptor Pepijn Caudron, who is best known for providing music for the oft perverse, ritualistic, and unsettling work of the Abattoir Fermé theater company. Appropriately, this debut compilation of those recordings is otherworldly, creepy, darkly humorous, and riddled with portentous silences.
While L’Autopsie Phénoménale De Dieu could arguably be best classified as dark ambient, there are a couple of unusual aspects to Kreng’s work that render him unique. For one, Caudron’s work was originally based entirely on samples. While he seems to have softened somewhat in this aesthetic extreme (this album features both a pianist and a percussionist), borrowed material is still Kreng’s backbone. Secondly, Caudron’s work has earned some eclectic and unexpected comparisons to artists such as Morton Feldman, Harry Partch, Deathprod, and Moondog. This stems largely from his penchant for burgling from such highbrow sources as modern classical, first generation electronic artists, field recordings, and free jazz.
The opening piece, “Na De Sex,” begins with twinkling piano and a lone soprano, before segueing into a lurching reverie of discordant piano, shuffling jazz drums, abrupt electronic flourishes, and uncomfortably sharp violins. It closes with a campy movie snippet involving witches. I wish Caudron had used more film dialogue on the album (he has a knack for it), as its rare appearances make for many of the album’s highlights and flashes of humor. He is also quite adept at using female classical vocalists to haunting effect, but he is much more liberal with that. Incidentally, the noir-ish “Tinseltown” which follows, sounds like Erik Satie playing along with a field recordings of African percussionists while a disoriented trombonist and a deeply troubled violinist take turns wandering into the room. Eventually it all stops completely until a haunted-sounding blues or gospel vocalist laments “Oh Lord” to break the brief silence.
Some of the other more striking moments on the album are the nightmarish, yet propulsive “Kolossus,” and the menacing and vaguely tribal “The Black Balloon & The Armadillo,” which makes very effective use of rumbling low-end distortion. I was also quite fond of the disquieting “In De Berm (Part Three),” which uses samples of free jazz drumming to maintain an ebbing and flowing intensity while all kinds of strangeness swirls about. It ultimately concludes with a mournful soprano, a lonely church bell, and movie snippet proclaiming “we will dance…like nobody ever before.” The following “Nerveuze Man” sounds like a continuation of the same track and culminates in some uncomfortable chromatic strings (I’m somewhat puzzled by the seemingly arbitrary nature of the song breaks). The album’s centerpiece is probably the threatening and dense three-piece song suite “Scenes Met Mist,” but some of it verges on being bombastic. There are some other elements of heavy-handedness strewn throughout the album (such as prominent sounds of a woman weeping) too, but it is impossible to determine whether they are a result of clumsiness on Caudron’s part or merely a necessary component for the theatrical work. It is probably the latter, but they still hurt the album- I’d like to hear Kreng attempt a stand-alone work.
I don’t honestly know quite what to make of this album. Caudron is undeniably doing something rather unique here and has a lot of great ideas, but taken as an entire album, L’Autopsie drags a bit and ultimately sounds a bit one-dimensional. Also, soundtrack albums that are disembodied from the actual work they are soundtracking rarely hold up on their own. This was no exception: rather than becoming immersed in this album, I was seized with the nagging feeling that actually seeing a complete Abattoir Fermé production would have been an infinitely more rewarding experience. At the very least, it would certainly contain more rape, human sacrifice, and necrophilia. That said, I will definitely throw this on if I ever find myself in a situation where I need to brood or lurk menacingly in a ruined castle (or at a black mass).
(The CD version of L’Autopsie includes seven more tracks than the limited edition green vinyl version, but the vinyl version has much sexier artwork.)
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