Obscurium - Noumen (CPU)

Title: Obscurium 

Artist: Noumen 

Label: CPU

Cat Number: 01010010

Genre: IDM

1: Mist

2: Hydra

3: Call of Darkness

4: Haunter

5: Clinch

6: Lock

7: Square

8: Spleen Tear

9: Winter Sighs

10: Arclight

11: Tail

12: Fading

13: Slick

14: Flow Through the Surface

I know nothing about Noumen, so I’ll stick to the music. However, if ‘Mist’ is a taste of things to come then he’s bonkers. The backdrop reminds me of Cabaret Voltaire, or more specifically Richard H. Kirk. It’s ominous, hints at the environmentally degraded and is pervasive over the course of this work. The foreground is largely composed of a glitch-embroided soundscape, and again is a template which is sporadically returned to. The music shifts from the chaotic to the more coherent: ‘Arclight’ being a impressively funky example of how to do unorthodox sounding breakbeats over bittersweet swathes of machine melancholia. ‘Flow Through The Surface’ is the soundtrack to an imaginary helicopter flight to Spitzbergen, infinitely glacial. ‘Spleen Tear’ is breathtaking in its microscopic clarity and sounds like the soundtrack to a stalking seen from a hypothetical Hitchcock production in a parallel world. Of course I know a bit more about Noumen now, I’ve looked him up and he’s from The Ukraine. Does he have any mates who hang off bridges or other tall buildings? The schizophrenic music he makes suggests that he might, (and do the same himself). ‘Haunter’ is just over four minutes of portentousness, and would be soundtracking the cutting of the turkey at every Christmas dinner if I had my way. This majestic piece of work is the interior analogue of an exterior world; which one though?