Boar Alarm
Automatic For The Dead People
The Starving Penguin
Nominally a solo project intended to work within the style plied by Fredrik Djurfeldt as one half of Severe Illusion, Boar Alarm quickly skewed away from the minimalist EBM of debut Conform To Decay with the much noisier Under The Surface. To the surprise of no one who’s been tracking Djurfeldt’s voluminous recent work (at a quick glance, I count four other full lengths released across three different projects in the last twelve months), Automatic For The Dead People delves further into the colder realms of pure industrial squelches, feedback, and trembling drones.
The loops which make up much of Automatic offer something more of a hypnotic, repeating foundation than Djurfeldt’s other projects like Analfabetism. But “rhythm” in a traditional sense doesn’t really communicate the effect of the flatlining kicks which sit at the base of “Eyeless”‘ pile of scraping feedback. Even when rhythm is given a more traditional place in the mix there’s little in the monomaniacal skitter of “Move” and the jackhammer of “Cannibal Hate” (the latter somewhat reminiscent of Author & Punisher’s pneumatic triggers) to suggest EBM.
Despite not filling every moment and corner of each track with washes and ambience if not outright pure noise as we’ve heard elsewhere from Djurfeldt of late, the way that industrial pioneers would establish and then disrupt loops, either by altering them or simply slathering them in additional noise in a chaotic manner is a touchstone on Automatic. Sampling what sounds like a red-lined programming glitch and tossing it into the back half of an already heavily syncopated loop of frapped out kicks on quavering album centrepiece “Dog Fever” is much more emblematic of the record than the comparative respite of “Never Believe” and “Stepping On Ants”‘ cold pulse (though those two cuts do hearken back to No More Alive Than You Deserve-era Severe Illusion). Hell, even the aptly titled “Silence” (cheekily clocking in at 2:42 rather than 4:33) doesn’t hold true to its titular promise, punctuating the silence with a three-second squall.
The cold, unblinking meanness which runs through effectively all of Djurfeldt’s work, from Severe Illusion to Analfabetism to the new Hexopthalma collaboration should be expected by anyone not going into Automatic For The Dead People completely blind. Here, piece by piece, the structural cornerstones which defined so much post-industrial music are pared down and chipped away at, leaving behind an unyielding and unsettling core though a process of addition via subtraction.
