U41 | Sala | scare me not
scare me not I_excerpt
scare me not II_excerpt
format : CD ltd to 200 hand numbered copies
all copies come with an additional art card on 300gr satin paper
release year : 2017
length : 64’50
tracks :
scare me not I
scare me not II
status : still available
>>> order via Paypal : chalkdc@unfathomless.net
(Belgium) : 14 € (inc.postage)
(Europe) : 15 € (inc.postage)
(World) : 16 € (inc.postage)
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: info :
Kid’s memories – they haunt like wild hounds, persecute in dreams and execute their unknown goals till the final bell tolls. Then, there, again, with every passage through these familiar places I fall into disorientation, my vertigo increases, breath sporadically quickening – they are here, they appear as large structures in the clearing, speaking in the elementary language of silence and decay. Monsters out of time with inanimate coral-like metal webs, dead but dreaming cthulhoid relatives on the ground calling me voicelessly, dissolving my selves till I surrender…scare me not, scare me not!
Iron elementals braided with iconic cosmogonies – corrosion eaten machines from soviet era, betrayed, forgotten, despiritualized. What can they tell to me, what spells do their amuletic screws still possess ? Carefully I crawl with ears open, all my senses tense in almost orgiastic state, seduction is inevitable! Low hum and creaks! Chtulhu speaks! Scare me not, scare me not…
In awe I operate in devastated state with esoteric surgical instruments of sonar knowledge extracting, deconstructing and re-constructing again the digital phonic golem to fight my phantasmal childhood hounds. Rhythm and incantation, low drone and colourless all-negation. Swarm of rust lifted by the wind from gasoline saturated ground. Scare me not, scare me not…
(Audrius Simkunas, December 2016)
: reviews :
Sala is a Lithuanian project which at one time used to be a trio comprising Audrius Šimkūnas, Ramunas Personis, and Vasha Dadaja. On today’s record Scare Me Not (U41), from the Belgian phonography limited-edition label Unfathomless, I think it’s exclusively Audrius Šimkūnas who is creating these two lengthy field-recording suites of understated quiet menace, which have been taken home and treated in the studio to bring out even more layers of unsettling threat.
He made the field recordings in a site near Utena, which was evidently a junkyard in the forest filled with “abandoned Soviet machines”. I have commented many times before on the way in which sound artists are drawn inexorably towards these zones where once there was evidence of heavy industry, and now there is nothing but desolation. I sometimes wonder what it is they’re trying to prove, what they’re looking for as they point their recording devices at rusty machinery and trip carefully around disused rail tracks for mine-carts. In the case of Sala, he might almost be on some semi-mystical quest for self-realisation. He took a “selfie” which he includes inside the record, and the first thing I notice is his grim frowning face, as if he’s a visiting sage from another older civilisation coming to our present day, clearly displeased by what he beholds. The second thing I notice is his white hood, which might be a suit to protect him from radiation (whatever went on at Utena?!) or perhaps some form of monkish garment to aid him on his secret ceremonies, as he works patiently and quietly to utterly condemn and damn this cursed industrial zone.
I have to admit the photos of the areas – again taken by Šimkūnas, treated and laid out by Daniel Crokaert – are pretty evocative, with the mysterious cylinders lurking in a scary forest. The old rusting typewriter, overgrown with grass, is an especially nice touch. The colours (and indeed the subject matter) of these photos fits right alongside many other releases from this label, as does the subtle sound-art ambient phonographic noise. Sala has achieved, in sound, a fairly interesting blend of natural and industrial sounds, and collaged everything together into a long gloomy meditation on decay and entropy. From 2nd May 2017.
Ed Pinsent
The Sound Projector
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Scare me not, scare me not. One can almost hear Audrius Simkunas, aka Sala, muttering these words to himself like a reassuring mantra, standing alone in the depths of a great, mysterious forest. Memory plays a predominant role in Unfathomless releases, but few seem to encapsulate childhood fear as well as Scare Me Not. It is not that the recordings here are especially sinister, or creepy, but that there is a looming mysteriousness about them, as if, at any moment the boogey man might rear his ugly head. I’d argue that Simkunas isn’t saying we should all face our fears already, but that maybe fear is an important part of our memory, that it plays some pivotal role in human development. In any regard, Scare Me Not provides ample space to mull it over.
From the number of albums I’ve heard that come from Lithuania, the place seems brim-ming with abandoned war era locations. Inspiring for field recordists, these sites beckon their reawakening through sound, and it was one of these locations where Simkunas found his inspiration for Scare Me Not. Using the cavernous space of bygone, rusty objects as his base note, Simkunas reigns in sounds from his surrounding environment. Bird song is the first thing that is heard, appropriately enough, as birds are the true commencers of the day. The remaining environment is introduced very slowly, a short, bellowing drone here, the soft shuffling of human activity there.
Things pick up around the 15 minute mark, where three or four different sound sources coalesce into a soupy alien soundscape. It’s hard to say how Simkunas achieved a lot of these sounds, perhaps with some specialized sensitive sound equipment. He seems to allude to something of the nature on his description of the work, referencing “esoteric surgical instruments of sonar knowledge extracting,” whatever that means. Later on, around 19 minutes in, there is a pleasing, higher register tone that undulates in the back-ground, acting as a nice counter to the more tactile elements. Reminds me a bit of Ora.
Unfortunately, Scare Me Not peaks a little early, and I’m not entirely convinced that it warrants it’s 65 minute run-time. The 20 minute second part meditates a little too heavily on a drone that sounds like someone leaned a guitar against an amp and walked away. However, there is more going on to the piece then that one uninspired drone, and Simkunas is smart enough to have more than a single element at play at any given time, keeping things interesting. I can’t imagine returning to this work too often, but it is an interesting album nonetheless, if not at least for the unique sounds and feelings it conjures up.
Adrian Dziewanski
The Alcohol Seed
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I do not write about bad or very bad albums. Maybe I did several or dozen years ago but probably only a few times. I discovered that there is so much good music that there is no time for bad one. So, now I dedicate my texts to You, dear readers, writing about good albums, very good albums and masterpieces. The album which I want to review here is a Chef-d’œuvre, Masterpiece. It is not just a very good album but much more than that. SALA – I will be frank to You – always was one of the best bands/projects to me (not because it is from Lithuania, Utena town). It made lots of albums from 1995 as a several men band (the first industrial/tribal style album was “n/trance” and came as a tape in a plastic bag with a folder and an insert with a Crowley inspired manifesto, written both in English and Lithuanian). Officially, according to discogs.com, there are 18 albums of SALA, but in reality – much more as its mastermind Alas23 (Audrius Šimkūnas) is more than just a musician: he is an erudite, philosopher, photographer, cinephile and many more (not to mention that he lives “normal” life with family). So, let’s begin.
CD “Scare Me Not” came out as the 41st album of famous Belgian label “Unfathomless” (by the way, in 2004 another great Lithuanian composer – Darius Čiuta – released his album “Ld2i-(3)” here) on the 1st of March, 2017. The albums’ location is a site with abandoned soviet machines and building materials near Utena (Lithuania). It was mixed in Sala‘s studio 2013-2016.
Before talking about music, I want to mention especially aesthetic design of the release. Limited edition of 200 hand-numbered copies, all include an additional art card on 300gr matt-coated satin-paper. Packaged in clear vinyl sleeve with folded insert. Artwork [Treatments] and Design [Cover] – Daniel Crokaert. Photography By [Cover Design & Treatments Based Exclusively On Photos By] and Selfie – Audrius Šimkūnas.
The music is called Non-Music, Field-Recording, Experimental in discogs.com. I would call it Earth music because it comes from Nature.
There are two tracks.
1 Scare Me Not I
2 Scare Me Not II
The first starts (and ends) with birds’ voices (here, I remember one more great Lithuanian experimentalist, also a rock musician, Gintautas Gascevičius who used birds’ voices in his trance-like album “FonoGrafijos” http://www.radikaliai.lt/garsas-sound/3966-recenzija-gintautas-gascevicius-fonografijos-2017-portalas).
The first track is 44 minutes and 4 seconds. The second one – 20:46. So, we have equally 75 minutes of Music. Or Sound. Or …
I always like to image my mundus imaginalis when I listen to such music. So, I do not really know what Audrius wanted to say with this album but it seems to me as good as Coil’s Musick to Play in the Dark. Something in common they have. And this is not just a music, it is a ritual about which I do not understand anything.
Lots of low noises in the second track make it more “scary” and it seems like a dual brother of the first one (although, in its middle, there are many noises).
That’s all I can say about this album. You must hear it. Audrius knows how to “make” Music, how to “make” great photos (he must release an album, I say).
Audrius says, he doesn’t care which album in row it is: “I have several albums that I began on my desktop. There are official CDs, self-releases, digital ones… What’s the difference? When time comes, an album comes out.”
The three best musicians for Audrius : Bathory, Slayer and Coil. Do not forget (if You did not know it): he played in the first Lithuanian pagan metal / neofolk bands in 1990s: Poccolus, Ha Lela, Zpoan Vtenz. Those bands will always remain classics of Lithuanian scene. Album of Poccolus (same title) was recorded at Tamsta studio (Vilnius, Lithuania) in autumn of 1995 and released in 1996 in South Korea (Hammer-heart Production). It is the only album of one of the earliest Lithuanian black metal bands. The album was rereleased in 2006.
However, the most playable band at Audrius’ home is SunnO))).
I would like talk more about SALA, but I can’t. I need to listen Scare Me Not again – those birds make me mad and ask to go into their crazy and mysterious forest with strange sounds…
P.S. The photo of the old printing machine is superb: it looks like a face.
Mindaugas Peleckis
Radikaliai!
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The abandoned landscape holds a particular allure for field recording artists, because an abandoned landscape is not an abandoned soundscape. This point is hammered home by Sala who investigates memories and imagines monsters.
Memory is another form of abandoned landscape. The old disappears or corrodes; we no longer remember what once was, or we forget the original meaning. In scare me not, Sala (Audrius Simkunas) returns to his childhood and insists he is not afraid (alt-hough we know he is, because we are). First we hear the birds, then the bass; he didn’t crawl into that dark canister, did he? He did? Oh no.
As the artist writes, “kid’s memories haunt like wild hounds, persecute in dreams and execute their unknown goals till the final bell tolls.” It’s not just that childhood is filled with dark imaginings, from the swaying curtain to the monster under the bed to the bully at school, but that terrors such as these persist over time, growing more abstract and pow-erful as they lose connection to their genesis. scare me not, writes Sala, scare me not. To listen to this hour-long set is to remember those early, primordial fears as well as to experience a sense of generalized anxiety, as the scratchings and dark drones imply that something may jump out of the sonic field at any moment. And pounce it does, 34 minutes in. But then it goes away ~ which some may consider worse. Where did it go? is an effective tension-builder in horror films, and the same is true here. We know that Sala made it out of that tank, but part of him is still in there, waiting for the claw on the shoul-der. .
Richard Allen
A Closer Listen
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I always like hearing new music from Unfathomless. This one is hard to pin down :
lots of field recording ambience blended with performative editing and environmental manipulation.
Quite dark and multi-layered.
actually, this changes quite a lot throughout the first track!
very diverse, some dubby elements here that I would not expect from an Unfathomless release;
a very constructed, rhythmic middle section develops, with hints of Coil and Zoviet France in the mix, though stripped way down and without the same kind of emotional dimension… this feels more voyeuristic.
Lucas Schleicher
Unfathomless 