Pierrot Lunaire - This Love of Mine (2013)

 

Tape Music / Sound Collage / Noise / Drone

RIYL: King Tears Bat Trip, The Hospitals, Ground Zero

★★★½

Pierrot Lunaire (that's Jon DeNizio's Pierrot Lunaire, not to be confused with the seminal Italian prog-folk trio from the '70s of the same name) is a modern drone artist who scrapes out dense collages of blistering noise that sound an awful lot like tunneling through dirt. Seemingly compacted from the sludge and detritus of many years' worth of tossed-aside old-timey TV commercials, classical records and ballroom recordings, his debut for cassette label SicSic Tapes, This Love of Mine, is a claustrophobic affair where discordant flutes, skronking horns, and the occasional muffled groan reach out to stab unsuspecting listeners as the walls close in on them.

If this sounds awful to you, you're probably not alone, and to be honest I'm still not sure why I choose to keep listening to an album that initially gives off such strong vibes of aural torture. The more times I spin it, though, the more its enticing and entrancing textures egress to the surface of their heaping mound and radiate sonic purity like diamonds in the rough. Split across four epics of over ten minutes each, getting through This Love of Mine may at first seem like quite the endeavor, but its buried treasures (as well as the sheer bliss of the closing minutes of finale "Angel Dust") make it all worth the while, especially if you're the kind of music enthusiast who managed to reach the end of this write-up without clicking away and never looking back.