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Campbell Kneale

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Birchville Cat Motel, “With Maples Ablaze” (Scarcelight, 2014)

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For years, I have rightly hailed Campbell Kneale as one of the true dark wizards of gnarled guitar noise, but I did not fully appreciate the depth and breadth of his vision until only recently: pre-Bandcamp, it was quite a difficult, expensive, and overwhelming endeavor to keep up with his sprawling body of work. As a result, several landmark albums fell through the cracks and remain woefully underappreciated to this day. One such example is this 2004 release on the now-defunct Scarcelight label, a hallucinatory suite of musique concrète, deep drones, and innovative collage that drew in a murderers’ row of talented collaborators like John Wiese, Bruce Russell, Jonathan Coleclough, Peter Wright, and Neil Campbell. As with many Kneale releases, With Maples Ablaze occasionally dips into some nerve-jangling and dissonant territory, but the high points are legitimately amazing to behold.

Kneale’s singular vision for With Maples Ablaze is one that defies easy description, but the first two of the album’s ten untitled pieces do as good a job at laying out its enigmatic parameters as anything that follows. After a slow fade-in that sounds like a gentle wind rustling through a meadow, the opening piece unexpectedly comes alive with brooding metallic drones and a sputtering eruption of hums and blurts that sounds like someone fighting with a patch cord that keeps shorting out. That cryptic and somewhat unpromising opening salvo then abruptly segues into the more compelling second piece, which marries a chorus of cheerily chirping birds with buzzing, heavy drones that converge into a throbbing and see-sawing pulse. Curiously, however, the field recordings stay in the foreground for most of the piece, only gradually and partially becoming consumed by hallucinatory flourishes of chimes and a queasily undulating haze of overtones.

For the most part, the rest of the album continues in a similarly elusive vein, casting a fragile and dreamlike spell that slowly dissolves from collage into drone and back again. As befits an album with such an unusual and fluid structure, Kneale and his collaborators were similarly unconventional in their choice of instrumentation. Even the most overtly musical bits (the drones) feel like they are emanating from rubbed glass, groaning metal, or spectral harmonics rather than actual struck notes. At other times, the sounds on With Maples Ablaze sound far more like someone throttling a large balloon animal in the empty hull of a vast cargo ship. Consequently, it feels like absolute supernatural sorcery when the album’s many strange textures and motifs cohere into something richly harmonic and sophisticated, which first happens on the album’s epic fourth movement.

It takes about five minutes to finally reveal its sublimely rapturous heart, of course, which is a rather masterful use of tension and deception. In any case, the vista that opens up is a truly gorgeous one, as Kneale combines a ghostly, vaporous haze of moaning melodies with a massive and shuddering edifice of shaking metal and warbling harmonics. It feels a lot like a haunted record player fading in and out of focus in a towering empty building that is shaking, swaying, and on the verge of collapse. In fact, it seems almost Biblical in its scope and beauty, like a non-hubristic Tower of Babel that is valiantly straining to reach the heavens despite the inexorable adversity of gravity. Of course, what Kneale was actually going for is anyone’s guess, as the piece eventually transforms into a long, clattering field recording of a train pulling into the Hamburg station. Trying to find meaning in this album is probably a fool’s game, but Maples certainly whips up a wonderful illusion that there is something profoundly meaningful happening that remains maddeningly out of my grasp.

Naturally, Kneale felt there needed to be a counterbalance to that achingly gorgeous centerpiece, so the album’s next major piece is a nightmarish, disorienting plunge into gibbering bedlam that sounds like a loop of backwards, pitch-shifted pop music. If I had an extremely bad reaction to a psychotropic drug while at a rave in the Smurfs’ village, it would probably feel a hell of a lot like “With Maples Ablaze VI.” From there, things stay very goddamn lysergic and unnerving for a while, as the eighth section feels like a field of infernal cows lazily mooing near a lake of bubbling lava. Unexpectedly, however, the album closes with lengthy final act of immersive, dreamlike reverie (albeit with some friendly chickens thrown into the mix, as well as some creeping menace). The twelve-minute “With Maples Ablaze IX” is the album’s languorous and lush false ending of sorts, as gently oscillating and slow-moving drones drift like heavenly clouds over distant sounds of clattering metal, chirping birds, twinkling wind chimes, and happy barnyard animals. It is a wonderfully warm and lovely piece, but it gives way to a more uneasy and ambiguous coda, as the lingering chimes are slowly consumed by a crackling and bleary haze of ringing metal and smeared, uncomfortably harmonizing drones. It evokes quite a surreal and enigmatically haunting tableau, like a solitary figure is quietly setting the forest ablaze around a small village as a church organ mournfully drones and a blacksmith hammers away in the distance.

The trajectory of With Maples Ablaze is not unlike sinking into an increasingly fractured and disturbing dream that opens up into an oasis of clarity once a crucial threshold has been reached…then having the slow realization that the oasis is actually a mirage. I was caught completely off-guard by how beautifully this album came together at the end, as there are definitely some lulls in the album where it feels like the narrative arc has been lost or derailed by indulgent bouts of abstraction. I suppose it is entirely possible that the thread was sometimes lost or that the album’s trajectory gradually took shape organically, but it is far more significant that Kneale ultimately pulled the disparate threads together into something exquisitely satisfying. With Maples Ablaze is not quite a perfect album, but it is absolutely a unique one and some of the individual pieces are quite beautiful, brilliant, and deeply nuanced. Naturally, Kneale’s many collaborators deserve some credit for the fascinating and ingenious directions that Maples takes, but he was the one that painstakingly assembled it into its complex and beguiling final form. Campbell Kneale took a leap into the unknown with this album and I have not heard anything else that resembles it before or since. Given the sheer volume of Kneale’s output, it is hopeless to guess where this release ranks in his vast discography, but I can confidently state that Maples is one of the more essential tips of an iceberg that I will be exploring for years.

Samples can be found here.
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Our Love Will Destroy the World, “Blue Eyes Are My Reward” and “I Hate Even Numbers” (Krayon/Dekorder, 2010)

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Campbell Kneale has been enjoying quite an impressive creative rebirth since retiring Birchville Cat Motel and re-emerging as Our Love Will Destroy the World, but he wound up with an extremely difficult predicament on his hands in the process: 2009’s Fucking Dracula Clouds pretty much perfected the art of being as gnarled, ugly, and visceral as possible and took guitar-based noise about as far as it could logically go. Unwilling to repeat himself, these two new albums document Kneale’s struggle to emerge from that stylistic cul de sac and find innovative new ways to remain vital and nightmarish.

It took me a while to warm to Krayon’s Blue Eyes Are My Reward because it feels a bit restrained and scattered compared to past Our Love Will Destroy the World albums. In fact, the exuberantly strummed acoustic guitar in “Kisses Flaming Hell” approximates what I envision Swervedriver jamming at a beach party might sound like (which is “pretty damn annoying,” actually). However, the rest of the album is pretty unwaveringly excellent despite Kneale’s many bold departures from his comfort zone. 

That said, he does include one characteristically snarling hellscape in the roaring “Triple Encryption Dynasty” that should please anyone hoping for more typical OLWDTW fare, yet the remainder of the record is packed full of unexpected surprises ranging from psych-damaged bagpipe drones to tabla-driven ethno-ambiance. There are also several songs that call to mind a more muscular version of mid-period Zoviet France, melding insistently looping pile-ups of odd percussion, field recordings, and voices with strangled and warped guitars. The fact that very few of these pieces are immediately recognizable as Our Love Will Destroy The World could arguably be considered a flaw, but that is an inherent and unavoidable peril with evolution in general. This is a very impressive and unexpected effort.

Listen to Blue Eyes Are My Reward here.

Dekorder’s I Hate Even Numbers, on the other hand, is significantly more immediate, distinct, abrasive, and consistent, yet falls quite flat progression-wise. Thematically, Kneale stays pretty focused on further exploring the possibilities of incorporating thumping beats and deep bass lines to his usual ear-searing, cacophonous onslaught. The dance music elements are generally kept pretty straightforward, like the four-on-the-floor house beat of the title cut, but that seems to be the point: rendering danceable grooves undanceable with shrill feedback, metallic whines, and a litany of non-musical sounds. 

Unfortunately, Kneale doesn’t quite go anywhere particularly worthwhile with it on the first half of the album, opting to idly ravage unchanging beats without much in the way of pay-off. The second side of the album is a bit more inventive, as both “Snipers on Skis” and “Twins Like Swans” are built upon unusual mutant-Indian beats, but it still can’t escape feeling like a series of underdeveloped song skeletons. The album’s brightest spot is “Tokyo Modern Magic” which marries a somewhat anthemic synth motif to grinding guitar noise and bubbling electronics with some success. It still fails to evolve much, but it achieves a kind of immersive power simply through sheer density and activity. I Hate Even Numbers is definitely heavy and attention-grabbing, but its appeal dies rapidly with repeat listens.

Of the two albums, Blue Eyes Are My Reward is the vastly superior one, proving that Campbell is still as daring, restless, and inspired as ever. In fact, Kneale himself has described it as the best thing he’s ever done and I come pretty close to agreeing, but Fucking Dracula Clouds was an absolute monolith of brutality. I Hate Even Numbers should have been yet another such triumph, but Campbell appears to have lost his talent for dynamics somewhere during the recording process: he seems a bit de-fanged, content to merely augment his songs with harshness rather than aggressively tearing them to shreds or burying them in avalanches of entropy. The difference between “unpleasantly discordant” and “viciously ugly” is a hugely important one, I’m afraid. These two records definitely leave me pleasantly puzzled, hinting that Campbell’s days as a guitar abuse visionary may be winding to a close, but that yet another artistic breakthrough may be imminent.
 
Listen to I Hate Even Numbers here.
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Our Love Will Destroy The World, “Fucking Dracula Clouds” (Blackest Rainbow, 2009)

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Our Love Will Destroy The World’s debut full-length (2009’s Stillborn Plague Angels) was a strikingly ugly, cathartic, and demonic affair that seemed to take guitar-based noise to its logical extreme. It turns out that it hadn’t, however, as Campbell Kneale’s newest black-hearted slab of vinyl makes it clear that he has no trouble at all dreaming up ingenius new ways to be bilious and face-meltingly heavy.

“Halloweenteeth” commences the horror of Fucking Dracula Clouds with a relatively tame low drone that is soon joined by a ride-cymbal drumbeat and a repeating feedback loop. Within a minute or so, however, all hell breaks loose and the groove is blindsided by an avalanche of shrieking, howling white noise chaos. At that point, all pretensions of song-craft and accessibility are conclusively vanquished for the remaining duration of the album. The rest of “Halloweenteeth” unfolds as a dense, throbbing, roiling squall of seething ugliness and it is wonderful. Somewhere beneath it all lurks something melodic and xylophone-like, but it is never allowed to come to the fore. Instead, it sounds like a pleasant song that is being bludgeoned to death.

“The Pleasure’s Everlasting” follows in much the same vein, though it is a bit more static and droning than its predecessor. It is built upon a thick bed of hums and crackles, but strangled guitar and swooping gales of static and electronics continually threaten to burst forth from the entropic miasma and take the piece in a harsher direction. It never happens though. In fact, the piece concludes without ever evolving or cohering into something more, yet it never becomes at all boring due to the sheer density and complexity of squirming and seething small-scale eruptions that Campbell has woven into it. While it is the certainly the most minor piece on the album, it is a very effective exercise in the power of simmering tension.

The entire second side of the record is occupied by the album’s clear centerpiece, “In Sleep We Creep,” which unexpectedly begins with the coupling of sloppy noise rock noodling and a ’90s techno synth bass line. Gradually, that unholy marriage is joined by a chorus of mangled voices and a buried thumping house beat, both of which steadily increase in presence. Then, both the garage rock riffage and bass line abruptly vanish, leaving only a thumping four-on-the-floor beat, thick doom-y distortion, and an intense cacophony of voices that sounds like a riot of the damned. 

Amusingly, it sounds like there is a cowbell incorporated into the murky, buried beat. Détourning a sexy dance beat into a pulsing, unhinged nightmare is an unexpectedly wry (and effective) move, displaying an impish side to Kneale that has historically been well-concealed. Eventually Campbell casts the beat aside, leaving only an anguished, smoldering wreckage of feedback and howling voices.

This is a significant creative step forward, as the inclusion of dark humor, ruined melodies, and pop music snippets, as well as the increased role of electronics and field recordings, show that Kneale’s singularly uncompromising and infernal vision still has a great deal of room left for expansion. Fucking Dracula Clouds is yet another great (and terrifying) record by one of the current reigning high priests of unpleasantness. 

Listen here.

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Our Love Will Destroy The World, “Stillborn Plague Angels” (Dekorder, 2009)

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Campbell Kneale may longer be known as Birchville Cat Motel, but he certainly has not stopped making abrasive, nightmarish music. Surprisingly, curating a Prince tribute album (Shutupalreadydamn!) has failed to translate into a funkier, sexier Neale. Stillborn Plague Angels is exactly the sort of album that Satan would make if he had the time and inclination to start a noise band.

Campbell Kneale has made many unusual changes in his artistic life over the last few years.  Most notably, he ended both the influential and beloved (in certain circles) Birchville Cat Motel (largely due to frustration with fan expectations), and his record label, Celebrate Psi Phenomenon (allegedly torching all unsold stock in a bonfire). Additionally, he formed a doom metal band called Black Boned Angel, started the Our Love Will Destroy The World project, and developed some serious animosity towards digital media (“Nobody’s going to love a puny uploaded file…they might like it, or maybe find it interesting, or be able to list it on their ‘what I’m listening to now’ blog. But they wont be able to LOVE it. These people are cursed.”). In keeping with this newfound media idealism, Stillborn Plague Angels is only available on vinyl.

The title track kicks the album off on an appropriately ugly and unsettling note, as a distorted throb lays the foundation for a menacing, metallic shimmer. Gradually, layers and layers of dissonant and unsettling synths and guitar noises are built up until the song culminates in a bizarrely effective atonal lead guitar part that would make Jandek smile. Amusingly, this teeth-rattling discordance is among the more melodic and conventionally musical moments on the album, as there are at least actual, clearly defined, notes being played.

The following two tracks can best be described as grotesque and corrupt hellscapes. They are both painful, uncompromising, and very difficult to listen to. I find that “Pink Hollow Paradise” is more of squirming, chattering, strangled miasma of shrill queasiness while “Chinese Emperors” leans more towards being a wavering, slow motion, anguished howl. I don’t know if I will ever listen to these tracks again, but they are both resoundingly successful in creating a palpable sense of abject horror. 

After some disquieting shimmering drone, “Chinese Emperors” erupts into the mournful guitar squall of “Over Prehistoric Texas” (although it might just be one long track entitled “Chinese Emperors and The Army of Eternity Over Prehistoric Texas”—the Dekorder website seems to think they are separate and I feel ill-equipped to win an argument with them over it, so i will assume that two separate tracks segue).  While “Texas” is undeniably more melodic than the previous three tracks, it seems a bit anticlimactic and uninspired after the previous visceral abominations.

Naturally, music this unrepentantly harsh will appeal to very few people, but Stillborn Plague Angels is a complete success artistically. Terms like “good,” “bad,” and “listenable” seem irrelevant in the face of such elephantine and single-minded ugliness. Dekorder quite aptly describes this album as “endless roaring catastrophe” and I have absolutely no qualifications to add to that. If such a thing sounds at all appealing, Campbell Kneale is someone to watch closely (albeit definitely without hassling him about your fucking unmet expectations).

Listen here.