PRE-ORDER - EXPECTED EARLY JULY
Nice Music presents, from the artist well-known in drastic DIY thrills circles as People Skills, the debut release under the endonym S.B.A. (or Samael B. Aaens). Shotput through a career of recordings for prestigious underground pillars - Siltbreeze, Blackest Ever Black, Kashual Plastik, Altered States Tapes, Regional Bears and I Dischi Del Barone, yet for the first time ever, S.B.A. touches home, unleashing a series of recordings using his distant glowing beacon 'Heresy Museum' as the pivot point for a deeply personal and philosophical shift towards collapsed identity and diverging output methods.
Distinctively framed in the haunted photographic accents of his late father Alfred P. Sebastian's archives, S.B.A. binds vacuum packed synthesis, intuitive textural collage and plangent instrument gestures, burrowing subterranean throughlines across Zoviet France's planetary ambient output, the dissociated meditations of Robert Turman, and Pinhas's classic dream-state 'Cyborg Sally', subbing all up-tempo surficial rhythms therewithin for hesitation.
Whether bounding with willful confusion or blithe serenity, 'Heresy Museum' channels the ark of material once performed under the People Skills alias from his time down under in 2023 into a mantra for transmutation. Its opener 'Half A Century Down' fires a monastic totem, as keyboard notes flurry into nothingness, then soundtracking Artaud's 'The Surrealist Bluff' follows, stumbling along a carousel of electronic protrusions. This never-too-eager pace maintains, dripping towards, as fast as it does away from, cinematic readiness. Side B opens with 'Rebuke Of Pollination' - a charged accusation, trembling as it slides into possessed repetition. 'The Mob Outside' lands a voice, but whose? And yet by the end, we have true 'Anastasis' - the resurrection point on which Sam chooses to rest for now.
There is a submission and fragility to these compositions, which does not so much colour this work as it does just melt over the top of it, obscuring what fires its objectives along more deeply. The throb and waft from chapter to chapter often barely restrains the winding piety behind the artists hypnotic discography - once more, we are left with a sensitive, yet madly compelling addition to his output, replete with set of clues with which to understand his spectacular homespun semiotics.
