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15 Degrees Below Zero
New Travel

Edgetone Records

Posted: Wednesday, April 09, 2008
By: Ilker Yücel
Editor

The trio of Daniel Blomquist, Michael Addison Mersereau, and Mark Wilson are indeed a strange bunch; collectively known as 15 Degrees Below Zero, their brand of experimental music creates a unique atmosphere that rides the fine line between pure audio torture and sonic bliss. Departing from their previous label, Crunch Pod, and now signed to Edgetone Records, the band has created a follow up album to Under a Morphine Sky that continues down their dreadful path of devastating soundscapes. However, New Travel finds the group leaning more towards a balance of the two extremes, where layers of actual melodies are incorporated in a much more prevalent fashion atop the discordant sound collages, glistening like reflections of sunlight over a vast ocean of noise.

"Landscape on Film" sets the tone as we are introduced to static glitches of unintelligible voices that slowly sink beneath a hazy wash of mourning guitar tones. The distortion builds up and runs dangerously close to overtaking the melody, but the guitar progression nevertheless shines through to the end, even as sparks of explosive noise appear in the sonic distance. In a track like "Westward," the cacophony serves to enhance the melody as sounds are filtered and reversed, ghostlike in their appearance on the track, before a guitar arpeggio appears to ground us yet again in a sense of musical familiarity. There is a wonderfully abstract quality to 15 Degrees Below Zero's style, something akin to the works of Tomandandy or the earlier works of Einstürzende Neubauten. This is particularly so on "Sunday Drive" as the rapid fire strumming of a guitar echoes and melds with a stuttering sound like a CD skipping as sharps stabs of distortion and noise break the monotony for only brief moments at a time. However, the track is also interesting in its arrangement as there is a definite chord progression at work with the skips and echoes changing tonality at regular intervals, creating a rather complex composition. Other tracks like "Circumference" and especially "Transition" are much easier to digest, with the guitars on the former track manipulated to such a degree that they mimic chiming bells from an Oriental garden temple while the latter track features psychedelic waves of spaced out ambience before ending with a high-pitched squeal that fades into cavernous reverb.

While certainly not lacking in the apocalyptic grandeur that defined their previous releases, New Travel is appropriately named as the group explores different musical corners this time around. There is still an abundance of mangled sound collages at work here, but the increased sense of melodic progressions mixed into the noise make for a much more intriguing listen. Even tracks like "The Peculiar Apparatus" and the closing title track have a percussion track, adding rhythm to their formula in a way that casual listeners can latch onto in hopes that they may be led through the labyrinth of dark ambience. This is not to say that 15 Degrees Below Zero's music is any more accessible than it was on Under a Morphine Sky, but there is greater attention paid to the need for balance between the disturbing and the appealing.