There are different ways of expressing the unease and inner malaise that to varying degrees grips each of us. On a musical level, the most explicit and well-known ones certainly are funeral death doom and depressive black, the one aimed at exhibiting the then mournful and mournful side of human feeling and the other, on the other hand, the one steeped in the most explicit despair. Vessel Of Iniquity, solo project of Englishman S.P. White goes out of his way to explore other means of expression, ideally going to extremes of the above to land on a noisemaking that at first repels, only to engulf irretrievably the brave ones who will accept to be prostrated by a pain definable more blunt than blunt. The British musician is also active in the equally insidious The NULLL Collective, so he is certainly no neophyte with respect to such sounds, which in fact are rendered with the right expertise and the necessary degree of conviction to turn what to many may seem to be just an artless sonic jumble into a work of some weight. The juxtaposition to a sonic terrorist like Maurice De Jong (Gnaw Their Tongues) may arise spontaneously in light of the above, but White’s work is somehow more organic, showing in several passages glimmers of listenability that make the proposal all the more effective, to the successful outcome of which a reasonable duration (just under twenty-five minutes) also contributes. For those accustomed to more extreme forms of funeral, a track like Void of Infinite Sorrow will provide an eloquent idea of White’s modus operandi, with the caveat that it is nonetheless the most “accessible” episode of the entire package along with the concluding Once More into the Abyss, in which a first half of ambient matrix is literally blown away by an atomic wind capable of bringing everything back to the state of primordial chaos. A remarkable work, to which, however, it is necessary to approach with the knowledge that this journey “into infinite horror” will by no means be a walk in the park.

2019 – Sentient Ruin Laboratories