Reviews

Placing frames of reference on this album could well do more harm than good, as Zone’s style of instrumental electronic music is quite individual, but having said that, actual description is most difficult. So take, for instance the stark spacious instrumental music of Throbbing Gristle, add a little bit of Asmus Tietchens weirdness, a tinge of ethnic and neo-classical music, and you’ve got some of the most devastatingly glamorous music to appear on record since...?

Shamefully, the LP is a limited edition of 100 numbered copies, so make sure you’re quick in ordering (unless you’re happy with it on tape) if you don’t want to miss out: it’s only £6.25 (Inc. P&P) anyway! [Potentia]
 

Electronic Music for the mind and body. The hoariest argument ever produced by the propagandists of the tyranny of rhythm ruling the popular culture is the one claiming a music can only be physical when it's walked all over by a four-square dance rhythm. The statement is invariably backed up with the somewhat dubious contention that anything refusing severe dance regimentation is somehow abstract head music totally lacking in feeling. Well, here's a new sine wave of cottage industry-produced electronic music that severs at the neck once and for all those who insist on a separation of head and heart…

Journey Through A Body was the title of an infamous Throbbing Gristle bootleg. It is also a most apt description of Zone's Sword Of The Sun (Potentia Records, Potentia House, 12 Martell Street, Fforestfach, Swansea, SA5 8HX or from Rough Trade Shop). Zone are a (presumably) Welsh group who generate the most elemental noises this side of a volcanic eruption and organise them into great blasting pieces like "Stopping The World" (it's all over within seconds) or into deep reverberating tone patterns capable of agitating less than secure structures to the point where they collapse ("To The Centre Of The Cyclone"). Impressive party tricks you'll agree. But what really makes Zone's record so exemplary is their compositional range. Some pieces take shelter under a great yawning umbrella of noise electronically expanded from a single source, while others tap nervous energies to fuel pulsing rhythm workouts. The sort of record Tarkovsky's Stalker might dance to.
 

Themes in each chapter are all interrelated becoming unified in the fourth chapter whose brief is to allow for absolute complexity within the utter simplicity of unity. At first appraisal this may appear to be asking a lot of the printed page. So in the reading Zone expect as much tolerance and love for others. It seems that a beautiful machine may as much be a metaphor for the World in which we live as it is a method of travel conveying the soul from spiritual desert to oasis. The images support the text in a vaguely surreal fashion in that the use of montage has allowed Zone to divulge surprising and imaginative juxtapositions. This resonates most satisfyingly with the plate entitled The Treader of the Dust. A factory interior peopled by workers positioning a long torpedo beneath a precariously mounted Sphinx. In appearing to hover this Sphinx is a Cheshire Cat both friendly and menacing: ‘The cat only grinned when it saw Alice. It looked good-natured, she thought, still it had very long claws...'
 

Simply the best of endorsements. Listen to the words of Jim O'Rourke after listening to an advance copy of 'Born Of Fire', back in 1990. Thanks Jim.
 

‘Born Of Fire’ is the follow up to ‘Sword Of The Sun’ where the general themes of Awakening, Struggle. Humility and Unity are given more musical and atmospheric scope. All very strange stuff you may well be thinking. But there is a pulse to Zone’s work and a kind of hideous beauty which reveals itself slowly to the careful listener.

Huge slabs of gothic atmosphere are erected during ‘Beautiful Machine’ only to be torn down and replaced by something more delicate on ‘The Butterfly Effect’.

‘Born Of Fire’ is meant to be listened to as a complete piece, but individual sections can be singled out without too much damage being caused. Zone are a strange and powerful force that you should plug into as soon as possible.
 

Of course, opinions differ over the diverse post-industrial experience as to whether it proceeds along the path of consumerism or goes down the blind alley of noise, repetition and self-indulgence. In reality, the most recent recordings rooted in "industrial culture" have learnt to develop in new and (fortunately?) unclassifiable directions, taking on board both traditional music and more apparently irreconcilable cultural stimuli to create potentially enjoyable works to anyone who applies their sincere intellectual curiosity. The Welsh group ‘Zone’ are certainly more eligible to make this assertion and, without taking away the rough charm of ‘Sleep Chamber’ permit me to advise, with particular enthusiasm, to listen to the CD ‘Born Of Fire’ that follows the LP ‘Sword Of The Sun’, released a couple of years ago in an ultra-limited edition. "Zone is a creative unit, based in the United Kingdom, who recognise the apparently differing individual, social and religious needs inherent in all cultures as permutations upon the central NEED for Love, Life and Light." is what is stated on the cover of this work produced by Andrew Cadmore and Chris Brandrick, with the help of their guests: a work not at all "negative" and unlistenable, but which moves from the measured techno-ethnology of ‘Heart Of The Atom’ to the very ambient electronic mysticism of ‘Born Of Fire’, from the sumptuous Gregorian chants of ‘Beautiful Machine’ to the unexpected acoustic folk of the ‘Butterfly Effect’ (with female lead vocal and Celtic melody similar to the Incredible String Band!), it all pulls together into an admirable spiritual severity on an invisible thread that binds the Arabic monastery represented on the front cover of the package with the Atomic Bomb Memorial Dome on the back. Don’t be afraid of the sacred fire of Zone, listen and absorb what is communicated.
 

‘Born Of Fire’ is the second album from Zone after ‘Sword Of The Sun’ [100 copies (?)] released in 1988. The new recording from these Englishmen from Swansea all at once deceives and seduces. It appears to be out of its time in displaying freshness and clarity. Four pieces in complete musical opposition composed of:

1. Religious chants sung by a core of men and the spontaneous pealing of bells. ‘Beautiful Machine’.
2. Rhythmic progression (explosion) by the gradual grafting of new timbres up to a final rupture. ‘Heart Of The Atom’.
3. Duet of mixed vocal’s for a Spring-like ballad, founded on acoustic guitar, violin and percussion. ‘The Butterfly Effect’.
4. Slow rise in harmonic power generated by synthesisers. ‘Born Of Fire’.

Zone thus mark their Interest in diversity, crossing four themes which in themselves have nothing in opposition: ‘Awakening’, ‘Struggle’, ‘Humility’ and ‘Unity’. This impeccable production writes itself into a musical trilogy and makes from Zone a remarkable work that perfectly masters (keeps control of) its subjects with/by a poetic language going right to the body (heart?).
 

It opens with ‘Beautiful Machine', a simply devastatingly gorgeous work. This eleven plus minute work combines a most exquisite, polyphonic medieval sounding Kyrie with piano and electronics in a way that is at once sumptuous, yet merely ostentatious or overblown. As befitting a mass movement, it exudes a reverent majesty and ecclesiastical solemnity, underscored by the church bells and organ-like timbres of the electronics.

‘Heart Of The Atom (Ground Zero)’ is quite different with its world music samplings and borrowings, which range from energetic African poly-rhythms to doleful Asian modes along with a plethora of exotic instruments such as strange double reed instruments, flutes, gongs, drums and bells, that seem to be derived from Japanese Gagaku, Moroccan dervish ceremonies, and other ritual music, not to mention some kind of Middle Eastern incantation and other non-Western singing. The resultant music is a rich multi-cultural bleed which is at once timeless and contemporary. universal and quite Western.

Only in the title-track does ZONE spotlight sinister and luxuriant electronics, though even here the approach is more rhythmic, if not a bit more accessible. The only miscue on the recording is ‘The Butterfly Effect’ and its reprise at the very end which features a kind of poor man’s 'Dead Can Dance' style, though the primary melody is rather banal and overworked and the singing without strength or conviction. Otherwise this is a splendid recording worth seeking out.
 

John Marshall writes: Lots of different styles fade into one another. Some of it is pretty hypnotic: other times it's eerie. Some of it would sound good in a wildlife documentary or on a film soundtrack. Track 2 starts out a bit like something from Clockwork Orange, but underwater! Then, when the piano comes in, it's a bit like Lydia Lunch's Drowning of Lucy Hamilton but more unnerving, less aggressive.
 

A great deal is said and written now about the 'inner' life, but forgotten almost entirely is what is 'innerly, or - as defined in one old dictionary - 'more within'. Their fascination with pan-cultural expressions of mystical and spiritual sentiment and sound already established on their first two albums, Zone here go deeper. Yes, there is the industrial edge, but perhaps only as a boundary or container for a search in music through the innerly qualities of space, time and life that hold us hostage to love. Divided into two nearly equal parts, the first of which, Desert Winds, is a strange drifting and gyrating sandstorm of sound that comes to rest only after some minutes of purposeful agitation. Then segueing into a more pastoral but proactive section characterised by religious chanting and plaintive piano, it becomes more meditative and patient with itself. As with everything Zone do, there is an attention to detail and genuine sense of not just searching but also finding, and it is this rare latter expression that makes their sometimes lonely and even troubled music as potent as it can be poignant. It is hard not be moved by this very human music, informed as it is by the nervous modernity of machines and too much thought, that moves at times hesitantly to a declaration of, if not freedom, then independence. When Desert Winds resumes its more powerful motion, it is with a feeling of confidence, a propulsive snare underpinning a strangely detached sample of mystic chanting that makes you stand back and listen with a peculiar clarity.

The Wisdom of the Prophets, which constitutes the second half of the album, once again builds a kind of sonic sacred geometry upon a shifting, modern soundscape. At first more gentle, it soon accelerates into competing layers of strident and syncopated rhythms generated by a number of instruments harking us back, paradoxically, to a timeless place. It is this conscious, engineered collision of the apparent past and notional future in a present rendered real that makes Zone's music and approach at once enervating and intimidating and, at times, elusive. Saturated with so many cultural influences and traditions as to make fixity of origin a futile pursuit, this is music that is made at once for its own sake and for that of all who listen to it.

From the inner to the innerly, not wider, but deeper, Zone continue to bring their mind into their music with marvelous focus. Not for fake-hearted.
 

It's been six long years since Zone's last - and sublime - album, The Divine Simplicity. This new CD from Chris Brandrick and Andrew Cadmore reflects a more varied approach with some strongly song-based material and some progressive jazz sax courtesy of Roland Ellis. The title track is a pleasant ambient instrumental with filmic qualities, 'Golden Rain' has a Celtic sound, whilst 'Frozen In Heaven' is soft mood music with an Andean theme inspired by a TV archaeology program about an Inca sacrifice.

A collaboration with Jeremy S Gluck reading his own poetry reaches its fullest expression on the 21-minute final track, 'Scavenging Soul (The Benefactor)'.
 

In the six years since their last release, The Divine Simplicity, music has changed. The first Zone album to be recorded entirely digitally, it is also - after the seductive discovery phase which witnessed so much of it for the band - one that is not at all dependent on sampling. In sense this is Zone's most direct and conventional album, its unifying theme of the motivation through love to freedom and enlightenment sublimated to the music itself, which is not as explicitly religious as it had been on its predecessor, where two long pieces forced the listener to co-operate in an exploration of its mystic, mythic themes. Paradoxically, through its very structure and discipline, Angel of Freedom is the more liberating of the two albums; The Divine Simplicity had sweep and a peculiar grandeur, but lacked the variety of this album, which veers from intimations of jazz to flashes of idiosyncratic brilliance more reminiscent of Robert Fripp than Psychic TV.

Beginning with Other Lives, a mixed meditation on the intertwining of lives through time, with Jeremy Gluck on vocals, the album then jumps to the clattering but harmonious Totality, featuring some sinuous saxophone from Roland Ellis that sets the tone for the bemusing journey this album represents, being a soundtrack of sorts for a Europe lost in itself to the East and surrendered to its fate. Indeed, this sense of the Occident and Orient in uneasy mutual recognition and collaboration often visits this work, which poised on the 21st century is bound to contain elements of its timestamp of a transition full for some of foreboding. What will be sacrificed, seems to be the keynote question at times, as - on Exorcising Attachment, for example - wordless vocals sounding Japanese in nature bring into close contact the feeling of the East and West on a middle ground of uncertain assignation. Clever, perverse, and even witty, this is part of the new Zone, with band's enduring duo of Andrew Cadmore and Chris Brandrick more at ease and effortless than usual, the cerebral pursuits of wonder now transformed to a gentler but more incisive flux rendered tangible on the gorgeous Herald Of Coming Good, a sprightly effusion of chastened wonder. Eros, whose face – in the form of a treated image of an ancient statue – graces the album’s cover, is again gentle, but with that subtext of energetic shedding of the superficial that here makes Zone more prescient than pleasant, a perception confirmed by the closing track, Scavenging Soul (The Benefactor) a lengthy piece hosting a spoken word journey over crisp, mechanical loops. The graduated, small tension of the title track, a slip of a song based on acoustic instruments, that moves from a shy suggestion of the possibilities of growth to a more expansive assertiveness is what this strange and powerful album is really all about: big on the inside.
 

Unusual, amazing, liberating: Zone.
It really is difficult to nail Zone. Their transformations go on, widely spaced, all content and no style except themselves. This is powerful electronic music, industrial to a point, elsewhere bordering on free jazz and contemporary classical boundary-pushers. If you value originality and elegance, look no further.
 

Zone è il progetto di Chris Brandrick e Andrew Cadmore, a sua volta boss della Potentia, label per cui incidono, e ‘Alien Nature’ è il loro nuovo lavoro per ora stampato con una tiratura di sole 500 copie. Il suono è quello di una elettronica minimale e sperimentale, a tratti quasi dadaista, ‘The Cabinet’. Praticamente non cantato, l’unico brano con una voce che più che tutto parla è ‘Always The Same’, ‘Alien Nature’ si espande su di uno stile che, pur restando sempre minimale e vicino a strutture ambientali, riesce in ogni brano a creare un percorso abbordabile e convincente.

La varietà dei suoni, che vanno dalla minimal trance di ‘He Came Out To Me’ all’etno trance di ‘Chinese Whispers’ per intervallarsi con momenti sinfonici, ‘Zero Point’ o ‘Enchanted Domain’, e strutture ambientali, ‘Duchamp’s Cycle’, rendono l’album decisamente fruibile confermando come si possa realizzare musica di ricerca senza dover per forza ergere un muro tra gli autori e gli ascoltatori. Quello che per ora manca agli Zone è per paradosso la capacità di creare uno stile loro che per ora appare ancora un incrocio di svariate influenze e che rende in definitiva ‘Alien Nature’ certamente un buon album ma non incisivo come avrebbe potuto essere. (5/9/05)

Review rating: 3.5 out of 5
 

Review rating: 4.5 out of 6
 

The duo of Zone brings a wide spectrum of ambient influences. It starts in a rather electro-ambient way, but rapidly moves into experimental collages and later on into pure cold ambient parts and even neo-classical inspired cuts. The cold ambient “Dream abuse” and the rhythm driven “Chinese whispers” are the best parts of this honest and diversified composition.