#vapornoise

I really don't know how else to put it in a way that makes it sound any better, but then again, this album is ridiculously obtuse & abstract. The sample editing is pretty minimal, so if you're picky about that, keep scrolling, but the few crops & edits done feel picked in a way that's both intentional and slapdash random, which really adds to the spontaneity of this album. These tracks can be a couple of minutes long or a couple of seconds, and each time, you have just enough of a snippet of the sample to get its place on the album and how it tells its own twisted story.

The story is twisted, in my view anyway; there's nothing explicitly told to you in the music or any details surrounding the album beyond its aesthetics and titles, so all you get is interpretative. To me, with the loud title formatting, the bright saturated colours, the sample choices, and the industrial noise-level amplification, on top of the sequencing and the track lengths, this tells the story of being captured in an overobsessive relationship and a pseudo-paradise simulation before breaking out and seeing horrific, bloody destruction outside before suffering the worst fate at the tail end.

The first four tracks, WE ARE ONE, THE HEAVENS, DEPEND ON HER, and OUR LOVE IS FOREVER, display this overaffectionate lover and the bright & colourful world they have locked you into. WINDOWS is an actually edited sample, and it sounds eerie & foreboding without giving much of that saturation away. NOWHERE ELSE, TALL GRASS (which is so, so short, it's almost humorous if it weren't for the rest of this album), and SHOW ME EVERYTHING display a sharp distrust the lover now has in you, trying to convince you that this place is not worth leaving, before you find the gap in ESCAPE, you feel resistance trying to pull you back in in THE UNIVERSE, and with the untitled final track… Jesus Christ.

I'm gonna be real, I could go on about that last track. It's the sole thing that turns this from a presumed joke to an actually serious concept record, for me. It's five seconds, it's a loop that plays five times, and the loop in question is the loudest, sharpest, most grisly, industrial, distorted, and borderline hateful song on the whole, entire record. It feels like the machine, in its deepest insides, is designed to murder you the second you have any hope or chance of escaping. It is, and I mean this genuinely with no exaggeration, one of the most frightening & scary pieces of music I have ever heard, and it closes out the record. It ends at the same volume as it starts, and you are snapped back to reality from blistering volumes to a completely blank silence. It might be the loudest song on the entire record, and then, in a snap, just as you are yanked & pulled down the deepest, darkest trenches of it, it's over. And that might be just as, if not more frightening to me than the track itself. It alone justifies and gives weight to the entire rest of the album before it. But that also means I cannot recommend you listen to it even hours before you go to bed. So, make of that what you will.