From Heathen Harvest

Zeno van der Broek, the musician behind the Machinist project, envisions a pretty bleak future for both mankind and the world on this, his third CD. The three lengthy tracks showcased here paint a monochrome picture of a world totally devoid of human life; the light of humanity has long been extinguished, and in its place are massed ranks of machines – machines whose only purpose seems to be that they have no purpose. They run day and night, going about their unthinking way, endlessly enacting the same ritualisms day in, day out, and doing so without the slightest notion that it is both fruitless and unobserved.

The vision confronting us is a bleak prospect indeed; emptiness, desolation, ruination and ultimately soulless. Van der Broek piles on the lengthy deeply rumbling, dark, and densely-packed drones, stacking one upon the other, creating and constructing a black, weighty, monolithic mass of heaviness and brooding malevolence. The air is thick with treacly fogs and choking smogs, physical miasmas stifling any life that has dared to carry on the legacy of earth and nature. Landscapes have been denuded and eroded; where once were vast cities, themselves choked with the hustle and bustle of commerce, traffic and life, nothing remains but toothless and eyeless ruins, or level plains of compacted rubble, forever archaeologising whatever was left of the creature called homo sapiens. It is in such devastated arenas, spectatorless, that the machines have their stomping ground.

Van der Broek certainly possesses an innate ability to conjure up the overarching twilit vistas where the sun, pale and wan even on a good day, attempts to force its light through that fog and smog; inevitably, though, it only succeeds in snatching miniscule patches carelessly torn in the compacted swirling fabric enveloping the world through which to project its little packets of photonic energy. It’s a place where even Gaia herself would feel depressed. However, it would be fair to say that throughout the three pieces on here I caught only glimpses of those machines; the predominant aesthetic here, for me at least, is the sinister blackness left in the wake of humanity’s abject failures. That’s not to say that this is no good; van der Broek’s encapsulation of the oppressively filthy rot and decay concomitant on our disappearance is well envisioned and captured, but like I say I am not entirely sure if I felt anything of the machine element emerging out of this – the word machine implies, to me, a sense of rhythm as well as noise and although there was certainly plenty of noise rhythm was noticeable by its absence, and this meant that I didn’t quite make that connection with ’machine’.

However that is only a very minor criticism indeed. Seen in the round, this can be judged to be a mostly successful album I would say; if you’re looking for heavy oppressive dank atmospheres, where the air itself is a physical medium thick enough to suffocate and kill, this is definitely an artefact to be acquired – the sound will sit on your shoulders and drag you down, pulling you into the hadean depths, humankind’s ultimate destination it would seem. This left me shivering, thinking of the mournful possibility of our ultimate demise; it also brought home a realisation that it would be terrible indeed if the world’s endgame were to be played out solely by machines and robots. Of course, the saddest aspect of all is the fact that we will have sown the seeds of our own destruction.