Review: BASE – AETYPML...

SOLIUM.

Or to use its full title: and even though you put my life through hell just hand me your sins I will carry them as I still feel pain where you wounded me.

Or to break it down further: 18 tracks that lurch forward on aching bones, each slumping to an unceremonious collapse after a minute or two. There is no will to persist here. Distortion cakes everything like mud, cramping the hinges of electronic hi-hats and dampening every drum, turning hip-hop instrumentals and percussive experiments into the descendant putter of an engine after the ignition is switched off. Zeal and purpose exist in negative; silence swoops down to claim each rhythmic loop as it staggers to a halt, embracing it in blackness as it withers, offering each the solace of admitting its own futility. Therein comes the relief. BASE can stop acting like these thumps and whirrs mean anything at all. He is repeatedly released from the theatre of life’s inexorable pretence by the onset of silence; again and again, these weary circuits call it quits.

After a start-to-finish listen to AETYPMLTHJHMYSIWCTAISFPWYWM, one finds that nothing specific has pressed itself upon the memory. Jotting down notes is the only way to collate specific details: “Cold Faithful” documents the rather mundane process of sawing someone in half, “propperchannels.org” sends the whirr of a jammed amplifier over the factory floor tannoy, while “Easton Kingdom” captures the process of slinging a broken drumkit into the dumpster out back. Yet while the particulars drain away immediately, I’m left with the record’s claggy emotional residue for days after. It’s like smearing all the colours of the palette together until they converge on that nondescript brown: a globule of numbness and cancelled-out extremities, no longer able to laugh or cry, witnessing life through the murky displacement of loss and everlasting fatigue.