Crónica: Pure: Ification

After more than ten CDs and several vinyls under different aliases, projects or collaborations that ranged a multitude of musical styles over the last 15 years, Pure’s newest release is now proudly presented by Crónica.

Three and a half years later than scheduled, and six years after his previous studio CD release Noonbugs on Mego, Pure returns with his fourth solo full-length album — Ification — the outcome of a long period of live work (documented in the first two volumes of the Home Is Where My Harddisk is series), residencies — in France, with Johnny Dekam, where the Reqoil Displaced Peaceoff DVD was produced — and collaborations — the Heart Chamber Orchestra with Erich Berger, an audio-visual performance based on the heart-beats of an orchestra of 12 musicians.

Ification presents a collection of seven highly diverse tracks that revolve around dense, filmic and eerie atmospheres, without ever drifting into obvious or simple harmonies. As in his previous work, Pure takes from music history whatever serves his narrative needs and appropriates it through his very own sound-mangling strategies. Complementing this approach, here, and for the first time in his work, there is a very tight integration of various instrumentalists, whose recordings — produced for this CD — are often the compositional base of the tracks.

The intro Fire is a short statement based on a guitar recording of Christoph de Babalon (Digital Hardcore artist and owner of the label Cross Fade Enter Tainment) freed from all flesh with only the bare-bones left.

After the Bomb is a long, gentle, deep meditation on the nature of low-frequency sounds with tiny melodies and subtle percussion sliding in at the end.

With Approximation Pure enters new fields with a simultaneous minimal and bombastic track built around what reminds high string instruments, low horns, and sparse percussion giving the track a classical touch.

Blind Flight is an epic, slow-changing drone piece that glides through time like a car by the night on an endlessly straight road.

Sonomatopoeia melts a composition of isolationist sounds with vocal experiments of female metal singer Alexandra von Bolzn going from silent whispers to bursts of aggression that out-power power electronics’ voices.

End takes the longest time to develop. In almost 16 minutes it travels from an eerie space filled with echoes of percussions and cymbals through a tunnel of static distortions of bass played by sound artist Anke Eckardt.

Closing the album, Iron Sky introduces one more surprise. Built around drums played by Martin Brandlmayr (drummer of austrian band Radian who also provided the percussion on After the Bomb) like only he can play them and another appearance of Alexandra von Bolzn the last track starts off with held-back heaviness decreasing to a standstill and ends in a melancholic, noisy rock-like piece.

Ification was written, recorded and mixed by Pure, mastered by Martin Siewert at Motone Sound Services, in Vienna, and its cover art was specially created by Jan Rohlf.

PureIfication

Credits