Sometimes music is for dancing to, for laughing to and for loving to. And sometimes music is an art form, a means to expressing something subconscious, so deep down, and utterly fundamental to the human soul that expressing them with mere words only serves to highlight the inadequacy of language over art. Such is the case with the Jennifer Christensen and Twilight Fauna’s two track split on Red River Family. The two tracks are joined together neither by style nor genre, but as a means express the inexpressible, to express the inevitable, when dancing, laughter and love ultimately fail us all.
Opening track, Jennifer Christensen‘s’ instrumental requiem ‘Sickness Unto Death’, is a slow, solemn and sombre piece for violin and cello, which seems to convey the inevitable journey towards death. It conveys the emotional dissonance through discordant music like a down tempo ‘Danse Macabre’, in places haunting and harrowing like Penderecki’s ‘Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima’. The use of repetitive structures is both dizzying and hypnotic almost to the point of inducing vertigo, yet at times the bleakness is beautiful, able to the catch of the heart induced with the violin pieces in DIS’s Widowmaker (Prosthetic).
The second of the two tracks, ‘Crossing The Threshold’, is by Twilight Fauna, which momentarily continues the vibe though with a more abrasive edge to it. The disturbing, atmospheric Black Metal guitars mixed with bleak winds, filled with a barely audible wraith voice whispering in your ear, is quite disorienting.
The theme is again discordant and abrasive, the sensation being like standing numbly as a storm slowly strips the flesh from you. The sense of claustrophobia is felt with a catastrophic intensity, which by the end of the track is enough to leave you gasping for breath, and without fanfare releasing you quietly back into the real world silently mouthing words which don’t quite seem to fit the experience.
Chilling and catastrophic, this is not music for the faint hearted, it is for the broken hearted.
8.5/10
RICH PRICE