Glice – Pyre

 

 

Glice – Pyre
Self released – 2021
Noise, Avant-Garde, Experimental, Metal, Soundscape, Drone
Rated: ***

We were honored to mention Glice’s earlier release Cielo back in 2017. An ambitious avant-garde noise album that evokes so many gloomy images and bleak emotions it is hard to listen to in your own cozy home. We suggested a landfill or a dark deserted metro station to truly enjoy Cielo. Well, the Amsterdam duo is back and have turned ambition into a huge understatement with their newest work Pyre. A double album that pounds you into submission with Part I, Cleave lasting 42 minutes and Part II, Coalescence 38 minutes. Blazing furnaces, ancient factories pounding steel and copper, hallucinations of machines stomping and hammering, battering and crushing. Sparks flying into the dark. Glints shooting into the night. And if you’re not seeing any of those infernal phantasmagorias, than it’s a gigantic cathedral made of magma and molten rock. Glice has indeed stepped up its game and delivers a marathon of distressing noise and oppressive drone. Co-produced by Lasse Marhaug; the artistic cinematic level is as intense as anything the man delivered himself and as jarring as all the great experimental works of art. For art it is and not for the feeble, the faint of heart or the man at the end of its tether. Pyre is for those that are tuned to the great and secret show, where memory, prophecy and fantasy, the past, the future and the dreaming moment in between are all one country, living one immortal day. To know that is wisdom. To use it, is art.  

(Written by JK)

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Glice – Cielo

Glice – Cielo

Narrominded – 2017

Soundscape, Atmospheric, Experimental, Avant-Garde, Noise, Drone

Rated: **

Droning, atmospheric, experimental, soundscape noise as a wallpaper to this gray month of November. We slide off into the icy waters of December listening to the four-track Cielo release by Amsterdam duo Glice. We are of course not listening to music at all. This is sound-art. This is music meant for dark deserted metro stations and preferably accompanied by the amazing sound to image art by guys like Ricky van Broekhoven. Recorded in the outskirts of Berlin by Einstürzende Neubauten’s Alexander Hacke we seem to be drowning in distorted distortion or travelling across a large body of frozen water. Ice, it seems to be a recurring theme throughout the four tracks. Coldness and disorientation, alienation and desertion. It seems to be breaking down the fabric of sound. It does this well and in certain locations (accompanied by visuals) this will be definitely magnificent. But, ah, there is the but; this does not seem to work at home. It might be due to the fact the fireplace is lit, spreading warmth and fickle shadows across an endless array of vinyl, books, posters and cd’s. All of which beg to be picked up and put on and have them warm the soul; where as Glice’s Cielo release proudly seems to announce this is not meant to be heard in cozy and homely places. I know of a landfill nearby; and will try it with a portable device and headphones over there. And if you don’t hear from me within a few days, I might have been frozen by the cold atmospheric noise that Cielo is…

(Written by JK)

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