This second collaboration between these two veterans of the 1980s UK noise/cassette underground is enigmatically rooted in the works of Lewis Carroll and schizophrenic outsider artist August Natterer. The result is an engaging, yet temporally dislocated, foray into ambient industrial music that sometimes favorably recalls some of Cabaret Voltaire's more abstract and loop-based moments (as well as a host of darker, and more sociopathic, tape-based experimentalists).
Zilverhill consists of Australia’s Schuster and Sheffield’s Present Day Buna, a rather inscrutable pair. I could not unearth much information about them except that Schuster was involved in the early stages of the infamously heavy and frightening Dieter Müh. The conceptual foundations of this album are equally mysterious and murky: while I can certainly see how its abstract and often nightmarish atmosphere and strange echoing field recordings and voices could be inspired by a schizophrenic artist, the album also features an inexplicable fixation with Richard Nixon recordings (“Nixon’s portentous voice & actions are intuitively fractured, reappraised, and manipulated to form the spine of the pieces”). It is hard to reconcile how it all coherently ties together thematically, but thankfully the philosophic underpinnings are largely irrelevant to the appreciation of the music.
The sonic content of Latent-Active-Descent is a surreal collage of shifting drones, hypnotically repetitive rhythms, blurred electronics, and disembodied voices. Sometimes it is relatively gentle, such as the sleepy marimba of “Sixteen Provinces,” but (more often than not) it can get quite harsh (as in “The Eternal Day Is Done,” which is reminiscent of some of Severed Heads' early tape loop experiments). However, the songs invariably writhe and seethe with all kinds of panning and surging sampled mindfuckery regardless of the basic material that each piece is built upon. The only time the duo fall flat is with the recurrent howls of agony throughout “Unceasing,” which is heavy-handed to an almost Lætherstrip-ian degree.
While its slow-burning and fever dreamlike nature requires a few listens to fully appreciate, Latent-Active-Descent is definitely an inspired and enjoyable effort. Though the material is very firmly rooted in the ‘80s industrial/noise underground aesthetic, it does not sound dated or regressive at all. Rather, it sounds like a great lost recording from that era (but with the clarity and density of more modern recording technology). This is some eerie, unusual, and otherworldly work.
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