Schloss Tegal

Available from Cold Spring Records, P.O Box 40, Northampton, NN6 7XQ, England.

THIS was my very first introduction to SCHLOSS TEGAL, despite having heard a great deal about them over the last few years. Born in the heart of Kansas during the early-1980s, this deranged brain-child of Richard Schneider and Marc Burch takes its name from one of the first clinics specialising in the treatment of mental illness. Not simply from a therapeutic perspective, however, the centre was also used to induce psychotic debilitation amongst the enemies of the Third Reich. Meanwhile, The beastly choir depicted in the CD’s interior artwork is amazing. I’m not sure who the artist is, but it resembles a macabre blend of Hans Holbein and William Hogarth. This recording is based on the stellar transmissions which are constantly being sent from what Schloss Tegal describes as the hidden ‘Anti-World’. But this is a process which most people are unable to perceive, not least because the medical establishment has waged a bitter campaign against natural remedies relating to magnetic aura. This, it is argued, is achieved by transforming human information receptors into thalassmia, or low levels of haemoglobin in red blood cells. Despite the fact that the CD appears to contain a total of seven tracks, it plays in two lengthy sections (forty-one and twenty-one minutes respectively). The opening rush of wind swirls like a murmuring Kansas tornado, with samples elaborating upon strange voices that arrive completely unheard but which can subsequently be heard on tape minutes later. This is achieved by using white noise generators, from which the captured voices can extracted electronically. The sounds themselves are Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP), samples from the world beyond. Ghostly rumblings which transmit personal information to the recipient. The samples used on this CD range from the scientifically human to the harrowing and the unknown: ‘Beyond the universe a light glows’. The result is a sonar cacophony of unexplained and fluctuating baggage, affecting the ears in the way that darkness and horror can affect the eyes. At times the EVP samples appear so indulgently sinister that it is difficult to ascertain whether the typical reaction should be one of fear or curiosity. Unlike a lot of Dark Ambient recordings, the minimalist approach is distinct by its very absence and a busy and varied collection of themes function as a highly eventful musical sub-plot. There is always a great deal going on. A rippling series of posthumous booms and slumps to occupy the enquiring mind. Emissions for the inquisitive. Conversational overlap for the serious eavesdropper. Listen to this in a darkened room and you’ll be tempted to reach for the light-switch. At one point we hear something resembling the hurried swish of black helicopter blades, almost as though one is being caught red-handed whilst being exposed to a great secret. A secret that the powers-that-be wish to keep latent and suppressed. Towards the end of the CD we hear a mixture of English and American accents, as the samples beneath degenerate into a screaming torrent. A nightmare soundtrack for Dante’s Inferno: ‘Let the night roar, because they can hear us’. This is dead-air in the fullest possible sense. Pure class.