S C H U S T E R
"BREAKING DOWN INTO HIS OWN OBLIVION"
Adeptsound
I imagine myself flying over the antarctic. Low, in a small aircraft. The sunlight is reflected off the cold snow and ice, and it's almost blinding me. Beneath the wings a vast emptiness is unfolding, and stretches on forever. No real features, but an endless white plain beneath an endless blue sky. This is the feeling I get from listening to the opening of Breaking Down into his oblivion. It's cold, it's minmalist and devoid of life (in a good way).
The first track of the album, "BD's lament", evolves so slowly you hardly notice time passing by, and suddenly you find yourself listening to soothing melodies supporting snippets of an obscure female voice telling me "He's breaking down to his own oblivion". The track may not be as dark as it promises to be, but that is certainly soon ammended.
The second track is by far the longest, at over 20 minutes, and gives the listener time to fully explore the universe Schuster provides us with. "I am living in my own corpse" is an ominous and perhaps depressing title for the track, but it fits. I fully enjoy the extreme minimalism of it and find myself breathing slower and easier. There is an unsettling element to this track however. By now we've clearly landed and are in fact spelunking in a vast cold maze. The tiny little squeeks in the background of this track makes me think of birds and other small animals. Ugly birds with blind eyes and no feathers on their stark red heads. Their shrill voices are accompanied by distant sounds of humans subjected to some unknown torture. Perhaps medical experiments. It's getting evident that we're no longer in the arctic, but somewhere underneath the wind blasted plateu of Leng, and this cavernous structure should be left alone. I love it. It's the perfect cross between Lovecraft and Biosphere. There is no doubt that this is my favorite track of the album.
The glitchy and syncopated beats that start "Your house is marked" catches me off guard. The change of style is quite surprising, but the track manages to fit in regardless. The mood and theme is the same as that of the first two tracks. Still if I had to leave out a track it would have to be this one. After this break of pace however "Manasarovar" is ready to calm you down once more with it's mongolian style drones and massive crash cymbals. Considering the fact that I've allready been teleported to Lovecraftian realms by "I am living in my own corpse" the mysticism of this track is highly unsettling. No longer in the arctic, but in a desert, surrounded by broken pillars and ancient ruins. Still the landscape is mostly flat and featureless, and I have a feeling of being completely isolated. The final track "Burdened" is a good ending to the album. Like the other tracks it has it's own personality but fits well into the overall scheme of the album. The desperation of the voice sample in the background adds depth to the track, and serves as a good reminder of the fucked up world we live in. If we ever needed one...
If I have to say something negative about the album as a whole I'd say that it's slightly long. I know people want as much sound as possible for their money, but I think anything that happes after fifty minutes is superfluous. It's hard to maintain full concentration for that long, and there are few albums that prove me wrong in this assumption. Personally I'd consider breaking this album into two different releases, and keep the fans wanting more, rather than giving them too much. Kaliglimmer (Batcheeba)
Schuster is Tim Bayes, one half of Zilverhill (previously reviewed here), original member of Dieter Müh and veteran of eighties cassette culture. Like many of his generation, the current fascination with and insatiable demand for obscure eighties material has prompted or made easier a return to the fray. Yet although the neo-eighties zeitgeist favours the return of such veterans, Schuster's work bears no trace of crowd-pleasing revivalisism. This is a serious, well-crafted contemporary release which gradually insinuates itself into your consciousness.
There are multiple layers of sound in Schuster's tracks, and different layers seem to predominate on different listens. There is a misty, mirage-like feeling to the album which never feels quite the same twice (which in present times is a worthwhile quality in itself). "BD's Lament" is a very slow, gradually accumulating mass of high frequencies, background voltage hum, and other less definable elements. Eventually an English female voice looms indistinctly out of the murk. The overall effect is simultaneously nightmarish and dream-like.
The centerpiece is "I Am Living in My Own Corpse", a twenty-minute plus dark epic which never outstays its welcome but just accumulates graceful power. It's a droning, rumbling passage through inner space, lightened by bell-like sounds near the end. Things turn relatively nastier on the equally sinisterly-titled "Your House is Marked". This is a much heavier and darker track, based around a heavily reverbed bassline, augmented by American radio chatter and an ethnic sample, creating an atmosphere reminiscent of Muslimgauze.
"Manasarovar" features massive gong-like impacts reverberating in a vast soundfield. It's hard to say exactly what Schuster is doing but the music manages to create grand, cinematic impressions using very subtle tricks and techniques. This is best heard on "Burdened", the album's (anti)-climax. This is based around a pitch-dark, intermittent drone gradually ceding space to a subtle process sound far down in the mix, creating the sense of the sound being pulled towards its own extinction - the fact that the fall is in such slow motion only makes the eventual crash (which we never hear) seem more catastrophic.
In short this is exactly the range of sonic illusions, textures and associated perceptions that many "dark ambient" producers aspire to but don't reach. It may or not may not be a mapping of internal psychological states but the result is a work that is half-familiar and half-uncanny, a masterful and seductive dislocation. Alexei Monroe [9/10] Connexion Bizarre
I'm spinning Schuster - Breaking Down Into His Own Oblivion for a couple of days now. Discography of the project seems rather strange - a couple of releases more than 20 years ago and a couple of releases during last couple of years. And that's all. I was unacquainted with this creator and the project so I don't have much more to say. Just that the same person, Tim Bayes, is also responsible for Zilverhill and Ideas Beyond Filth and tiny Adeptsound label in Australia. This CDr packed in neat envelope with a couple of inserts was also released by himself via Adeptsound. It's a journey that lasts for an hour and takes place in deserted nook where even mirages do not materialize in absolute emptiness. It's one weird record. You can listen to it for hours without realising that. Monotony of sound blends with the surroundings and just voice of woman that appears in several places, citing D.H.Lawrence's "Shadows" or gong lightly awakens, but you are soon carried away to grey horizons of sound. Album starts with hardly pulsating droney "BD's Lament". Hopeless and slowly changing dissonances that lasts for 11 minutes. When the track is going towards the end - woman's voice start citing several lines from aforementioned poem by Lawrence. I think the whole title of the album was inspired by this poem. And yes, this track is real lament. Not that loud one with rivers of tears and loud screams, but silent, smothered, the one that you feel when drowning in your own pain and oblivion. While listening to the second track - the term "wall ambient" was constantly knocking into my head. Sound is more rich than the first one and very soft. The main, base drone theme of the track almost doesn't let for distant variations to make their way through. Once more, the theme starts to vary more in the second half of the track with slight deviations of tones. Very good track. And the title - "I am living in my own corpse". Ain't we all doing the same in this life? The third song is different. A little strange and unexpected turn to rhythm. Loop, distant samples (I cannot get the words though) and drawling drone. The track gets more active at the end, but gradually dies away and we enter "Mansarovar". According to the title - it's sacred lake which can wash away your sins. It's located in India. Long echoes of gong merges with hidden drones. Thematically and in this particular context this should be the peak of the album; at least that's how I imagine it. I don't know if I feel the same way as Schuster, but it seems that the track that should purify, creates even more uneasy and more torturing mood. Reflections of life, death, murder and decay, in the surface of the sacred lake, mentioned in the description of this album, becomes even more real. And finally you fall under "Burdened". Wavy track. There are places that it gets more active and there are places where it turns into almost inaudable breathing. Woman's voice, citing the text (or is it sample perhaps?) and the album ends. Strange journey with Schuster that lasted for almost an hour, strange rebirth into new morning, new self. And trying to repeat it and not fail over and over again. Interesting work. I recommend to try it, but I definetely know that it's not for everyone. Terror Magazine
Schuster is Tim Bayes, a veteran of the early UK industrial/noise scene who now records and operates the Adeptsound label out of the city of Perth, on the distant western coast of Australia. Despite the heat and swelter of the area in which he lives, Schuster's new release sounds and feels like ice--ancient, glacial, patient, and indifferent.
Things get chilly right away with opener "BD's Lament"--a minimal synth drone hangs in the air for much of the track, augmented by subtle bass tones, and bitter, winding pulses. A distant, spoken interjection arrives and changes the mood briefly, before the grim drift of "I Am Living In My Own Corpse" arrives. This twenty-minute monster is the disc's centerpiece, skillfully mixing minimal synth drone with various bits of found sound. As the track progresses, chirping birds give way to the muted shouts of a panicked crowd; both are so deep in the mix as to be whispering out of the listener's unconscious mind.
"Your House Is Marked" allows a beat to break through the gloom. Unintelligible distorted vocals make sure that paranoia levels remain high, while "Manasarovar" uses synth and treated gongs to create a spectral topography. "Burdened" is the noisiest track here, interrupting a tranquil drone with a blast of harsh noise, then pulling back into a spacious, buzzing hive of sound. Bayles then adds an excerpt of a speech which details a mother's state of mind after she killed her child. Totally sensationalistic, perhaps, but the confession fits in neatly with the unsettling nature of this release.
There is real, insidious menace contained within Schuster's atmospherics; it is the sound of pure, epic dread left to roam under wide-open skies. "Breaking Down Into His Own Oblivion" is a worthy excursion into the darker crevices of the psyche. 8/10 -- Mike Griffin Foxy Digitalis
Tim Bayes is back with a new release on his own Adeptsound label under the Schuster moniker. He is also the man behind Zilverhill, who had two very good releases I’ve reviewed a while ago. This release, which marks the fourth for Adeptsound, will thus be put on with curious and high expectations!
The album starts with ‘BD’s Lament’, which immediately puts you into a very ominous but striking ambience. It has a very deep and drone-like industrial sound and occasionally we here female vocals repeating the album’s title. An excellent track to start of the album and is a definite attention grabber! The epic length, around 20 minutes, ‘I Am Living In My Own Corpse’, starts of with low drones, which actually somewhat reminds me of Raison d’Etre’s ‘The Empty Hollow Unfolds’ for a moment. The song has a slow and good progression where subtle sounds turn up. Because of the low sounds, it’s extremely ominous. This could very well be exactly what we hear if we are dead and buried under the ground; an endless stream of subconscious sounds. The song becomes more and more intense as it moves deeper into the subconscious. It also becomes less dark and more magical and esoteric. ‘Your House Is Marked’ shifts gears with an harder industrial sound approach and adds noisy rhythms to the song. Also distorted and processed guitar sounds and vocal sounds are added to eventually end into a kind of Apocalyptic mesh of sounds. ‘Manasarovar’ has a very deep dark-ambient sound with the use of gongs in places. The song is in style with the Cold Meat Industry school of dark-ambient and ritual elements. The trip ends with ‘Burdened’, which starts out as a very thick and noisy industrial soundscape. As the song progresses, sampled machine sounds are added between spoken vocal samples. To eventually end in a quiet and very ominous walk through dark corridors with beasts lurking down your neck.
Tim has done a great job again. This release as a whole is far more ominous than the other Adeptsound releases I’ve heard. The whole album is totally immersive and should give you an excellent set of nightmares. Lots of it will work excellent on a good set of headphones. A really deep dark-ambient/dark-industrial album that comes highly recommended. Fabian Gothtronic
Tim Bayes, who's been involved in music-making since the early-‘80s (IBF [Ideas Beyond Filth]) and currently partners with pRESENT dAY bUNA in the Zilverhill project, brings his own brand of dark ambiance to the soundscaping drone genre in Breaking Down Into His Own Oblivion. In Bayes' own words, the recording's “a reflection on life, decay, murder, [and] death, a hospice for like-minded souls. The all-seeing ear, it is made to be that way, a momentary glimpse of us and we are gone…” A sense of collapse and disintegration shadows the material, and the recording's disturbed tone is more than roundly conveyed by track titles like “I Am Living In My Own Corpse” and “Your House Is Marked.”
The recording, which features five pieces, four in the ten-minute range and one twice that length, begins with “BD's Lament,” an industrial drone of vaporous design that quietly seethes and exhales, suggestive of agitated spectres traversing the nightscape from on high; adding to the disturbed ambiance, 'Sara' can be heard softly murmuring text by D.H. Lawrence midway through the eleven-minute track. The recording's deepest plunge occurs in the second piece, “I Am Living In My Own Corpse,” where Bayes augments a twenty-one-minute stream of blurry rumble with distant animal chatter and the anguished cries of tortured souls, resulting in a totality that feels like a whirlpool's undertow dragging sinners downwards. Intoning like faint train whistles, slivers of light eventually emerge, suggesting that at least some of the damned have managed to extricate themselves from the vortex. A regulated downtempo funk rhythm gives “Your House Is Marked” a propulsion downplayed elsewhere, while a gradual accumulation of mangled voices, distorted guitars, and human wails gives the piece an overtly nightmarish cast. Generating the impression of a ritualistic death ceremony, repeated gong strikes reverberate throughout the dirge-like “Manasarovar,” after which “Burdened” brings the recording to a haunted finish. There's considerable dirt and grime under the closer's fingernails, and the track takes an even more disturbing turn when a woman's voiceover amounts to a murder confession. Though such harrowing content might suggest an equivalent treatment in musical terms, Breaking Down Into His Own Oblivion turns out to be relatively restrained in the presentation of its concept. If anything, Bayes brings a light touch to material that others might have treated with a heavier hand. Textura
From the Australian Adeptsound label I last year discovered the fabulous dark ambient Zilverhill. It seems that Schuster is part of Zilverhill although this album sounds quite different. Both projects are moving into the darkest ambient fields, but “Breaking Down Into His Own Oblivion” from Schuster has a stronger soundscape appeal. The album was introduced as being and I quote: ‘a reflection on life, decay, murder & death, a hospice for like-minded souls’. This is a precise introduction and a kind of warning as well when penetrating the universe of this Australian project. Frightening, deep humming sounds are like recovering desolate fields. A few emerging spoken vocals on the opening cut “BD’s Lament” inject an extra ghostlike sensation to the debut part. “I Am Living In My Own Corpse” comes next and will get you for more than 20” in its grip. The first 10” are less exciting as fewer things really happen. But progressively a kind of variation awakes bringing things a bit more alive. The song is however too long! “Your House Is Marked” comes next and sounds like the masterpiece from this dark voyage. This cut starts where the previous one has ended. There’s much more diversity in the sound-sculptures and atmospheres resulting in a real cool piece of anguishing music. The 2 tracks left both have a very strong visual strength, which I consider as a real reference for this kind of production. Together with Zilverhill we get a growing legion of impressive Australian dark ambient projects. Adeptsound releasing here their 4th release to date has a real nose for talented projects in the genre! (DP:7/8)DP. Side-Line
The enigmatic Schuster takes a poem by D.H. Lawrence about rebirth and uses it as an anchor around which drones of an empty hanger like ambience emerge.
Breaking Me Down is an epic drift through some seriously barren industrial drone landscapes. The magnificent twenty minutes worth of ‘I Am Living In My Own Corpse’ is a desolate stretch of empty vistas in which the exhaust of a mother ship slowly vents, blocking out the whats left of the grey light. Under each of these five foreboding tracks are pinned familiar industrial motifs; crows disguised as electrical chatter, anguished wails of dying souls [where would we be without the anguished wails of dying souls on material such as this eh?], gongs, industrial rhythmic chatter, fierce winds swept across blasted tundras. Far too many releases going for the post apocalyptic drone dollar litter their work with too many unwanted intrusions but Schuster uses them sparingly and to fitting effect. ‘I Am Living In My Own Corpse’ is the clincher here but all 60 minutes worth is a depressives dream come true. ‘Burdened’ comes with a distressed confession plucked from American TV Sotos style, the opener ‘BD’s Lament’ is a leaky steam trap from which emerges the softly spoken/recited Lawrence poem in question.
Played at heady volumes a limbo like stasis forms, its enveloping swell filling every pore. I played it endlessly as I slumped moribund in my Poang wondering if life were worth living and did they really play this kind of music whilst God made his mind up.
My copy came in a plain paper sleeve with a couple of paper inserts but Adeptsound promise a special hand made packaging deal. This raises further questions; were this to come on Cold Spring or Cold Meat Industries and have lots of bondage and hooked noses adorned on it my feelings may have been compromised. The power of packaging is evident but sometimes it helps to listen to things blindly.
The Perth based label Adeptsound releases a small amount of material much of which seems to emanate from what was once the corpse of England’s Industrial ambientuers Dieter Müh, its affiliates and associated labels. The vast majority of it provides recommended listening and its all done with little fanfare and to good effect. Past releases have been a little hit and miss but that may be just me. Schuster have come up with the goods here though and this is worthy of your overworked pesos. Idwal Fisher
There’s an incredible softness to the drones of Perth-based Schuster, as though made from wispy threads of cotton wool. Everything appears blurred, intangible, devoid of harsh angles. The title ‘Breaking Down Into His Own Oblivion’ thus makes sense, as that is what Schuster presents us with: granular deconstructions of various field recordings, exposing the ash-like particles that reside in air-conditioner whirr, machine noise and the din of conversation.
Much of the album resembles the sound design for David Lynch-inspired horror films, understated to the point of emptiness, like Thomas Koner bleached to further levels of degradation. ‘Manasaravar’ best demonstrates this, a brief crackled hum that slowly unwinds, beautifully restrained and free of development. ‘I Am Living In My Own Corpse’ is slower, and equally subdued, but tries the patience at over 20 minutes. The fuzzed out beats of ‘Your House Is Marked’ offers a departure, with distorted bursts of static resembling Pansonic or early Senking alongside squealing guitar, but the prevailing mood of dark-yet-cosy gloom remains. Joshua Meggitt Cyclic Defrost
Über ein edles Stück Tonkunst!
Obwohl der Größe entspringt Australien nur sehr wenig Untergrundtonkunst, die sich dafür aber komplett durch hohes Niveau auszeichnet, eine Begebenheit, welche auch für das neue Album “Breaking Down Into His Own Oblivion” von Schuster zutrifft, das feinsten Noise Ambient mit Einsprengseln aus dem Drone & Industrial zutage fördert.
“Breaking Down Into His Own Oblivion” erblickte über den kleinen aber feinen Verlag Adeptsound das Licht der Welt und ist in den Formaten CD-R + Postkarte oder kostenpflichtiger Download erhältlich.
Inhaltlich erlebt die Konsumentenschaft auf diesem Oeuvre einer Weiterreichung von privaten Erlebnissen & persönlichen Vorstellungen des Künstlers Tim Bayes, der seit 1986 das Projekt Schuster betreibt, welches bisher nur sporadisch Material auflegte, aber ab 2008 scheinbar in Produktionslaune verfiel, die zukünftig noch einige Releases z.B. mit Dieter Müh hervorbringt.
5 überlange, aber nicht langweilige Tondokumente füllen dieses aktuelle Schuster Oeuvre, welches eine atmosphärische wie leicht rhythmische/ rituelle Melange aus den Stilen Ambient, Drone, Noise & Industrial offeriert, die der Australier mit verschiedensten Sprachlinien (weiblich wie männlich) & z.B. den Klängen eines Gongs akzentuierte. Gerade Personen, die sich ansonsten mit Herbst9 & Wach usw. auseinandersetzen, sollten “Breaking Down Into His Own Oblivion” von Schuster einmal antesten. Besonders die zu vernehmende Komplexität & Dichte der Tracks mag gefallen, welche für ein einnehmendes Hörerlebnis von Anfang bis Ende sorgen, das zur Tiefenentspannung vom stressigen Alltag beiträgt. Zudem arbeitete der Protagonist feine bedrohliche Spannungskurven ein, die die Aufmerksamkeit der Hörerschaft permanent hoch halten.
Teilweise wartet das Opus mit einem gewissen Soundtrackcharakter auf, weshalb die Benennung eines expliziten Anspieltipps entfällt – einfach CD in den Schacht und in die Sounds von Schuster eintauchen.
Fazit:
Tim Bayes (Schuster) präsentiert mit “Breaking Down Into His Own Oblivion” ein edles Stück Tonkunst, welches über Ausdruckskraft, Spannung & Abwechslungsreichtum verfügt und vornehmlich Individuen anspricht, die im riesigen Pool von Industrial, Noise, Ambient & Drone Veröffentlichungen Anspruch und Gefangennahme von Alben verlangen – meine Empfehlung! RaF Kulturterrorismus
