Jeremy Moore often feels like a one-person assault on music conventions, a man on a quest to obliterate the comfortable and the conventional and replace them with a music form that truly challenges the listener. Of course, it won’t be for everyone. What is? IAnd, there is nothing wrong with the well-crafted, infectious, three-minute pop song (although no one has really done that well in the last 25 years, at least not in the mainstream), but for those who understand that it is in the revolutionary creative fringes that the seeds of mainstream music evolution lie, his work is not only interesting but vital.
With Zabus and Bell Barrow, he has followed the course of his crusade in recent months; now, he is back with a second Zero Swann album, Benefactor, to add additional avant-garde armaments to his sonic army.
The opening title track at times sounds like The Doors being picked up on a broken receiver in a distant galaxy. The signal is slowed and distorted by the effects of time and space, interfered with by the acoustics of squalling solar flares and gravitational forces. And if that seems like an extreme way to talk about music, it is because everyday language does not suffice.
“Theatre of Spectral Symphony” is a searing blend of industrial noise and eerie darkwave washes, a clash of caustic sounds smoothed over, very slightly, by the pulses of a fretless bass and other sonics which still feel as if they are being cut to ribbons by what lies at this beguiling instrument’s heart.
“Post Mortem Bricolage” sees Moore push things towards a more song-oriented groove, perhaps feeling like the most extreme of those early post-punk pioneering art-noise manipulators. It’s extreme stuff, this music, apocalyptically psychedelic, full of melted, free-jazz forms, relentless, compelling, but even at its most intense and oblique, you can hear it’s inspirations, the ghosts of other iconic bands – the roar of early Sonic Youth, the obscurity of My Bloody Valentine, a more experimental take on Swans, or The Birthday Party.
This is music made in the moment, with equipment and sounds pushed to their limits to convey a mood, thought, or feeling —the sonic equivalent of speaking in tongues, perhaps, to capture that unfiltered first sonic emotion, no matter how bizarre it may be. And no matter how bizarre it is, it is always the truth.
