‘Epic’ may be chronically overused in music journalism these days, not least of all by me, but ‘Eleven Mirrors to the Light’ – which, as the title suggests, contains elven tracks – is huge, with each of those eleven tracks having a running time in excess of seven minutes. Actually, at the risk of sounding like an anally-retentive clock-watcher, all of the tracks have a duration of between 7:00 and 7:04, with seven of them running to the 7:04 mark. So now who’s the anally-retentive clock watcher?
Eternal hiss – is it cymbal work, is it a snake or a broken gas pipe? – provides a treble-focused tonality over which hums and groans sight and wheeze as they undulate in their abstraction. This isn’t an album you listen to for the individual tracks: the pieces bleed together to forge an unsettling, ominous whole.
It’s dark, uncomfortable, and all the more successful for avoiding moment of extreme abrasion or bursts of high volume. The fact ‘Eleven Mirrors’ finds Z’EV show such remarkable restraint is something in itself. Muttering, rumbling, distant undulations: they ebb and flow but never break, meaning that the enormous tension remains unresolved, and it’s therefore impossible to settle into the flow of the album at any point.
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Yes, the third track, ‘Speil’ is particularly bleak and sonorous and uncomfortable in its layers of multifaceted drone, containing as it does some really quite difficult frequencies, but then the same could be said of numerous passages as they rumble in and out.
This is, of course, one of the problems the listener faces: ‘Eleven Mirrors to the Light’ is too abstract to demand concerted listening, but is far too dark, too heavy and too tense to be considered anything like an ambient work. There’s no way anyone’s going to sit back and chill out to this. And so ‘Eleven Mirrors to the Light’ is an album which really doesn’t fit onto any particular place, in terms of style or form or genre, or any particular corner of anyone’s life. And the fact that once again, Z’EV refuses to conform to any classification, anywhere, ever, is a cause for celebration.
Z’EV – Eleven Mirrors to the Light
Online
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