skm-etr - A Better Place

Alan Moore's The Watchmen is a seminal piece of fiction, done up through the medium of words and pictures -- the graphic novel. Assisted by Dave Gibbons' vibrant artwork, Moore draws a fascinating and terrifying vision of a future that has come unglued from compassion and empathy, cast adrift in a sea of blood and chaos. In this world, the heroes have been unable to remain untainted from the corrosive violence that pollutes the blood of the world. Some of them have withdrawn into exile, some of them have become government-sanctioned assassins, some have quit, and others have elected to fight evil on its own terms. The bleak dystopia permeates the first chapter of Objective-Subjective's 12-part sonic recreation of Moore's work. A Better Place is skm-etr's apocalyptic opener, a blast of noise and vitriol that starts our journey into the dark night of the soul.

Three tracks with alternating interludes of caustic sermonizing, A Better Place is a twenty-minute excursion into noise territory, filled with overloaded frequencies, feedback-drenched snarls and the guttural cough of a live power cable. The harsh electronics beat against the listener like waves of electricity, burning synaptic connections and brain cells with the crest of each tumultous cycle. Not as unrelentingly noisy as Merzbow or driven as hard as the jackhammer percussion of Winterkälte, Skm-Etr's soundtrack to Chapter One of The Watchmen boils with repressed rage; running throughout the noise pieces is the distorted voice of a man singularly focused on the violent solution to a violent world -- this is the birth of Rorschach. As an introduction to the world of despair which pervades the early chapters of the story, A Better Place is just the sort of sonic conflagration which warns us of the evil that men can do when their world becomes unhinged. Suitably atmospheric and creepy.

Skm-Etr
Objective-Subjective [2003]

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