Zilverhill +Eötvös+ CD
"Accomplished dark ambient"
Difficult Listening RTR FM Radio.
"We strongly recommend this fine release"
"Zilverhill takes us into vivid, disturbing soundscapes that bring the listener into another reality.
Zilverhill is a collaboration between the experimental artists Schuster (a.k.a. Tim Bayes, hailing from Perth, Australia) and pRESENT dAY bUNA. (a.k.a. Paul Carr, from Sheffield, England). Both these artists have an extensive history stretching back to the early '80s. However, +Eötvös+ has all the trappings of great modern production.
The album opens with the lengthy "Veris," which centers around a droning, phased D note, but occasionally twitches with the odd vocal sample. "Aiken" is where the album becomes interesting; a low-fi, glitchy synth is coupled with walls upon walls of sampled phone diatribe. "Proven" traps the listener in what seems like a giant clock (one the size of Kansas) where we hear everything from small gears grinding to the various faunae running about within. Perhaps the strangest track on the album is the displaced "Ominous" with its quiet piano aside the narrative of a woman recounting abusive family incest. "Hiding" seems to follow suit with its sampled unsettling screaming throughout. The album closes with the epic "Saarinen," which overwhelms the listener with a sea of disenfranchised noise.
There really aren't any shortcomings to this atonal work, aside from the dismissible 12-minute opener and the incredibly unsettling nature of some of these recordings, which might draw a large cross-section of listeners in. If there's any work that +Eötvös+ would draw any parallel to in terms of atmosphere, it would be Coil's classic How to Destroy Angels, except with incredibly modern methods of generating the disembodied sounds within.
A fair warning to any potential listener: don't listen to this while driving alone. Your mind will drift away to alien places where they haven't been before, but have always seemingly wanted to go."
JSun Bruner ReGen Magazine
"Though this fine slab of dark ambient inaugurates a new label based in "the world's most isolated city", Perth in Western Australia, the roots of the project, like the roots of just about anything dark in Australia's brief history, can be traced back across the water in England. Zilverhill is a collaborative venture between Tim Bayes, aka Schuster, a veteran of 80s Industrial cassette culture (go a-googling and explore the murky connections between Schuster and Nottingham-based Dieter Müh and, surprise, you'll eventually unearth a Nurse With Wound connection via Colin Potter) and pRESENT dAY bUNA, about whom I've been able to find precious little except that his name is Paul and he's currently located in Sheffield. But whoever and wherever they are, they've signed a terrific release here, 70 minutes of beautifully structured electronica based on transformed loops of everything from disembodied answerphone messages and radio broadcasts to oppressive synthesizers and crunching machinery. There appears to be a clue as to what some of these field recordings might be over at Cyclic Defrost ( "the sound of a gas rig thudding and grinding underwater off the far north coast..") but most of them remain fascinatingly inscrutable. Unlike many similar albums that find their way here, this one had me listening all the way through, three times in a row; it's rare to come across a disc that sustains interest without flagging for an hour and ten minutes, but this one does it just fine. Whether the album title has anything to do with Hungarian-born composer and conductor Péter Eötvös I couldn't say. Add that to the list of unanswered questions raised by this splendid debut outing."
"It was one of these days I was really pushed out of this secure and civilized World I am a part of. The day I first got a glimpse of this band via their Myspace page. Shortly after I got this album for review, and it just communicated to me in a way I have never experienced before. There is just this presence of something alien and obscure within the music that I am unable to explain. It´s all about experiencing it, and really, keeping it to yourself. This is such an album that you don´t play for fun, or for party. It´s calm music that moves forward at its own pace. Brilliant samples that add something twisted and stripping it down to a level where human presence is alien to this kind of music. It creates images in my mind that I do not welcome when I dream. Images of something weird, something unusual and something of musical value. Whether you play this with lights on, or off, it has powers that will penetrate all of its surroundings. And I am no way able to describe this with words. All I can, and this comes from the bottom of my heart, recommend this to those of you who welcome great music that is out of the ordinary. This is a must have. A controlled industrial ambient journey through a musical landscape that is beyond our World. Way beyond. I would say it´s alien. But this is only parts of the truth, and the best possible compliment I can use."
J. Loon Nordic Vision
"This beautifully packaged limited edition CD is the debut release on the fledgling Adeptsound label. It is a fascinating if somewhat uneven sonic exploration into all things noisy and ambient. Its dichotomous nature is immediately felt upon transition from the minimal piece “Veris” to the dissonance of “Aiken.” “Veris” is as beautiful as it is stark and cold, sure to please discriminating fans of minimalist works by artists such as Mathias Grassow and Klaus Wiese, with perhaps just a slightly more industrial edge to it, with indiscernible vocal samples or the like. “Aiken”, on the other hand, is a two-word conversation ad nauseum, static, and other scratchy and obnoxious sounds. “Proven” has a cool sound like a door slamming underwater, repeating in a pulsing pattern, but it is a bit unrelenting even as deep metallic drones surround it nicely. “Self Murderers” continues this deep trek into sounds at the microscopic level, twisting and bending the waves in unique ways, though it truly stretches the definition of what is music. Fans of more haunting works by Robert Rich or Lustmord may find “Ominous” to their liking with dark atmospherics, sparse piano, and an odd female monologue. “Motus” continues the emphasis on sounds with a raw, aggressive edge, though still ambient. The mechanical sounds are interesting, and vocals again hang in the background mysteriously. “Memory of Water” is aptly named, seeming to swirl about darkly. “Hiding” is another intense cacophony like “Aiken.” “Saarinen” provides a lengthy, comparatively soothing tonic to come down from this intense exploratory surgery of sound. Recommended for the truly adventurous."
© 2008 Electroambient Space
"This is the first release of Australian label Adeptsound in conjunction with Blind Shouter Products and this auspicious debut was the “Eotvos” album, by the Australian duo ZIVERHILL. The act consists of Schuster and Present Day Buna. Schuster first appeared in the cassette culture in England at early 80’s with various bands, while Present Day Buna also working on his own label Blind Shouter recs. The different explorations and musical diagrams come to see the light just this year after working so hard on the general production. And more when they saw the excellent results though “Eotvos” which is derived from a spatial crater somewhere in the moon. So, its explorations and deep investigation was just present in this release, as an important element in the whole concept release.
Important aspects unleashed by ZIVERHILL, is how its incorporating elemental contrasting themes of inertia and movement, the shifting sounds presented here encompass a many layered evocation of somewhere else. An impressive voyage breaking all possible limits of human mind though sonic experimentations with a high dose of creativity and charism is what you shall find through the 9 compositions released here. In “Eotvos”, from ambient to noise passing though experimental improvisations are enough elements you will surely find more than interesting, due the way in which they are handling. Always through diverse sounds converging all the time.
“Veris” is a long ambient soundscape carelly laid upon swirling drones, which meets with concrete eerie sounds and very interesting arrangements. “Aiken” evokes feelings of dread, psychotic explorations in mind due raw, harsh noise sounds crawling though repetitive drone elements which seems to carve your mind all the time, the inclusion of reverberating spoken words gives a more psychotic atmosphere. With third track called “proven” everythings goes oriented more into industrial/ambient preludes full of such strong moments. “Self murderers” is an invitation to self search liberation, to self suicide though mechanic deep intense drones, and prossessed elements, with a raw edge of insanity.
“Eotvos” is the culmination of years of hard work and experimentations with sounds at times chaotic, at others ambient. This work is permeated by a sense of unease. Without a doubt the ZIVERHILL career has marked an important point with this release. “ominous” another track with dense sounds and spoken female vocals floating through the harmonic atmospheres and eerie drone elements. The rest 3 tracks includes so incredible paths to explore such as dissonances, repetitive pulsations and distorted elements with a high musical quality. This cd comes in a digipack limited to 500 copies only. A recommended release here."
"Although posting private letters that arrive along with promo copies is not, and will not be, a habit, I found a personal note on the press blurb for Zilverhill's '+Eotvos+': hello Frans, seems a long time since IBF - remember them (circa 1985)'. Well, yes and no. I do remember IBF, or Ideas Beyond Filth, but how did they sound like? I honestly don't remember. Too much music has passed under the bridge. More importantly, and more appropriate perhaps, what's the relation with Zilverhill, which 'represents a collaboration between Schuster and Present Day Buna', which leaves me with even more questions, such as 'who are they'? There is more to ponder about in the blurb: 'incorporating elemental contrasting themes of inertia and movement, the shifting sound presented here encompass a many-layered evocation of somewhere else, a third period, the 11th hour, the day's end...'. Gettit? Not me, but if I look on my screen the time is 23:04, the day's end. I am not yet too tired to listen to
Zilverhill and think about the music, IBF, Zilverhill and the day's end. I honestly don't remember what IBF sounded like - but I think I said that already - but it might be something like Zilverhill? Their music seems like being put into a time machine and thrown back twenty years and listen to a crystal clear version of music that was once released on audio cassettes. Loops of mechanical rhythm, field recordings (although that word wasn't a common place back then) of electronic processed water sounds, more electronics, more sound effects. Maybe I am thinking of Contrastate's first two albums? I am old, this music is old, the day is old. One of the pros of getting old is that one can easily, more easily that is, dwell in nostalgia, to be free of the pressure of being young, new and hip and reminiscence about something old and think: well that surely sounds like something of those days and actually it's quite nice. '+Eotvos+' is such a work. Perhaps not something I would play too often, since I would rather play say those two first Contrastate LPs, simply for the fact that I 'know' these, but due time '+Eotvos+' may be also one of them. In 2028, God permits, I'll be getting a letter: 'remember Zilverhill?. (FdW)"
Vital Weekly Number 640 Week 34
"The first release from a new West Australian-based independent imprint, Adeptsound, Zilverhill is collaboration between two other experimental acts, Schuster and Present Day Buna. So many elements of this album, Eotvos, have the feel of unnatural machinery making their sound apparent in natural settings. Whether it be the sound of a gas rig thudding and grinding underwater off the far north coast or listening to inhuman voices talk at you as you sit and watch the violent fire of a West Australian sunset, Zilverhill is kinda what happens when the afternoon subsides and the day is peeled back into evening to reveal all the delicate shards displaced by your movement and all that has been kept in place by inertia.
The opener, “Veris,” is a prelude to the remaining hour of album, with its twisting elongated keyboard drone the occasional splutter of talk-back radio and sub bass boom. From there things start to get a little more menacing as fiery bursts of distorted noise shudder through second track “Aiken” and what feels like an industrial hammer clanging the way through “Proven.” Halfway through and “Ominous” has a lady recounting the abuses she suffered at the hands of her family which would be more disturbing if it weren’t for the quiet piano being looped throughout. The remainder of the album continues in a similar vein, all muted bass and outer-limit machine clunk. If this isn’t the recorded version of what it sounds like to fall asleep on some off-shore oil rig in the middle of an open ocean, I don’t what else could be.
The length of Eotvos - nearly 70 minutes - might be baulked at by some but the consistent flow of the tracks and the sparing use of sampled humans keeps the listener aware, engaged and, at times, successfully unsettled."
Joel Hedrick Cyclic Defrost Magazine Issue 20
“Eöt'vös exper'iment; an experiment to confirm that all materials respond equally to gravity and that gravitational mass and inertial mass are equivalent. Cf. equivalence principle.”
Or so I read somewhere. This is the first album by a band on a new label, the Australian-based Adeptsound (in collaboration with one of the band members own label, Blind Shouter Products). The band is actually a collaboration of two other acts; Schuster and Present Day Buna. I’m not familiar with those two, but the music on this album sounds very promising.
The album starts somewhat ominous with ‘Veris’. It has a very claustrophobic and spacey sound, with some vocal samples throughout. The second track, ‘Aitken’, starts with a vocal loop and then some distorted sound layers are added. As the song progresses there are more vocal samples added and the song feels like we’re listening to a distorted radio channel. Very interesting track. The next track, ‘ Proven’, starts with some metal on metal rhythm sounds, with some deep effects. Again there are layered samples of human voices. The metal rhythm stays almost throughout the whole song. It feels as if we’re in some construction area, only in some alien place. The fourth track, ‘Self Murderers’, has also a somewhat strange and alien feel to it. As if we’re in some weird transmission area. Strange repetitive sounds are evolving around the listener. Then ‘Ominous’, which lives up to its title; very ominous sounds with a cinematic quality. Then we hear the voice of a woman, who talks about being the sexual interest of her brothers and being abused. Very sweet! The next track, ‘Motus’, is again more noisy, with some distorted sounds repeated. This actually sounds like ‘easy listening power electronics’. Very contradictory, I know, but you know what I mean once you hear it. It has the sensibilities of power electronics, but then in a more accessible and acceptable form. The seventh track. ‘Memory of Water’, starts very weird. We hear the sound of some phone (I don’t know for sure what I hear) for a short while and then a pause for a second, and again that sound. Then a drone comes in from the background and again some vocal samples (this album really loves those). The samples sound like they come from a phone or something. It actually becomes somewhat voyeuristic, as if we’re listening to some forbidden conversation. The eighth track, ‘Hiding’, starts with some piano and bass sounds. Various vocal samples are added again, with various degrees of intensity. This works really well as a kind of stress song. The last track, ‘Saarinen’, starts with some transmission-like sounds, in the middle of the night. Very mysterious sounding and feels as if we’re witnessing the climax of an alien life form leaving.
This is a very interesting release and very mysterious in its nature on what it is really about. It has the feel of something alien, like the Roswell incident. But also governmental conspiracies were we are being monitored all the time. Kind of like The X-Files, only not. Highly recommended!
"Debut CD for Zilverhill, new and mysterious experimental entity, also marking the debut of two Austrialian labels: Adeptsound and Blind Shouter. "+ Eötvös +" moves along nine gloomy and disturbing tracks, equally subdivided between dark ambient and hostile experimental sounds, with memories of people like Zoviet France or the early Severed Heads. Sampled ghostly and distant voices, sometimes repeating words obsessively till they create a sort of rhythm, metal thuds, anguished drones and freezing atmospheres massively characterize tracks like "Proven", "Self Murderers" and "Memory Of Water", while with "Hiding" it seems to go back in time, to the era of Throbbing Gristle and of the first, historical experiments in the field of industrial music.
Final "Saarinen" is very long and meditative, a blend of field recordings, almost imperceptible rhythms and distant sounds, like abandoned to themselves in the air. On the whole, this Zilverhill's debut doesn't create anything groundbreaking, but shows, nonetheless, that the band has learned the lesson of the aforementioned names and knows how to handle the ambient industrial matter with a certain ability."
Simon V. Filth Forge
"+Eötvös+, the premiere release from Western Australia label Adeptsound, is by Zilverhill, a two-man outfit comprised of long-time collaborators Schuster (Tim Bayes) and Present Day Buna (Paul G Carr, who heads up the Sheffield imprint Blind Shouter) both of whom have been kicking around since the early ‘80s in various configurations. Grinding machine rhythms and equally dazed mantras bludgeon the listener so mercilessly throughout the seventy-minute collection, one begins to feel stupefied by its disturbed ambient drone settings. Offsetting the instrumental dimension, voices often appear but typically so distortedly one strains to decipher the content of their muffled communications.
In the unsettled twelve-minute opener “Veris,” voices punctuate a low-flying industrial drone to modestly interesting effect. Considerably more engaging is the dizzying “Aiken,” which incessantly loops and layers multiple voice fragments (“Hello?”...“Ma'am”) while a relentless slab of static churns underneath, and “Proven,” which is underpinned by the incessant clang of (what sounds like) a prison door. Gloom sets in during the beatless soundscape “Ominous” but it's refreshing to be offered respite, however brief, from the hammering rhythms that have come before. The track's still no walk in the park, however, since the listener can't help but overhear an unidentified female recount various personal horrors (“He gave it to me just before he committed suicide… The first time he beat me up so badly, I couldn't stop crying for eight days…”) and, if anguished voices are any indication, a violent act of some sort also seems to be occurring in “Hiding.” Ghoulish voices moan like exhumed corpses in the eerie closer “Saarinen” which mirrors the opener in length. Like a deathly incantation designed to re-animate zombies, the piece lumbers for twelve agonizing minutes before returning to its grave. Bayes and Carr clearly designed +Eötvös+ with a specialized listening audience in mind."
Textura Magazine Oct 2008.
"Zilverhill, whose first album this is on the newly established Australian imprint Adeptsound, is a collaborative effort between Aussie artist Schuster, responsible for some cassette releases in the early eighties and self-proclaimed originator of Dieter Müh (through Art Vs Filth, that is), and Paul G Carr of Present Day Buna fame, originally from Lincoln but now based in Sheffield or so I’ve read somewhere.
This new album, entitled Eötvös or rather + Eötvös + (it’s all part of the concept, man) and deriving its name either from a crater on the far side of the moon or a unit of acceleration divided by distance named after a 19th century Hungarian scientist (which is indeed as cool as it sounds), this new album then, starts off with a twelve-minute track called Veris, one long dreamlike keyboard drone interspersed with some random noise effects highly reminiscent of some of the Maeror Tri material, the kind of dark ambient favoured by old-fashioned punters like yours truly who can’t handle it when a band has got more notes in their entire discography than your average doom metal band has in one song.
Luckily, that is not the case here so read further. Or don’t, depending on your music tastes. Even though track number two (Aiken) proves a somewhat noisier and altogether murkier affair, going all de-structured and atonal on us, things then resume their normal course, so to speak, by favouring dark-tinged atmospheres either based on the aforementioned sound waves (track five, Ominous, could have been lifted straight off a Raison d’Être album) or more abstract and distorted sound structures. Pursuing in this rather directionless fashion, the album closes off with another twelve-minute behemoth both ethnic and tectonic, altogether not dissimilar from what Herbst9 might propose if they had a day off. Depending on one’s preferences, it’s all a bit of a hit and miss affair (much like letting someone else do the shopping for you without telling them what you need and checking the contents of the bag upon their return) but I must be frank and admit that it does reach greatness at times (Motus being a personal favourite) and more than deserves a place in the racks of those brave enough to cast aside the blinders and listen to something else than your average dark ambient fare. Mind you, we’re not talking absolute groundbreakingness here but Eötvös, er, + Eötvös + certainly has enough balls to have you listen to its entire seventy minutes without once reaching for the remote control (for the most prosperous amongst us, that is), a welcome thing indeed in this disposable age."
Grégory Dejaeger Judas Kiss
