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Elklink
The Rise Of Elklink
Kye 09
LP
£13.99
It’s interesting to note the way that The Shadow Ring – in common with Whitehouse – became increasingly obsessed and – yes – perverted by language as their careers progressed. By the time of the strange, melancholy later Shadow Ring albums – Lighthouse, Lindus, I’m Some Songs - the earlier surrealist narratives were gradually being replaced by a discomfited Sebaldian grey and a focus more on word as sound and sound beyond meaning. Like Whitehouse they began to deliberately manipulate syntax and sense, corrupting words and smearing tones in order to illicit less defined reactions in the listener while moving further away from ‘vocals’ altogether. In many ways Elklink – the duo of The Shadow Ring’s Graham Lambkin and Adris Hoyos of Harry Pussy – take this tendency to its very extreme.
Last time I encountered Elklink they were being introduced by Heather Leigh at the legendary Brattleboro Free Folk Fest, with Lambkin and Hoyos accompanied by Matt Krefting of Son Of Earth and Scott Foust of Idea Fire Company et al. It’s not often remembered or remarked upon that Elklink played the fest but then their performance was so confusing, so defiantly arch – Foust grated carrots for most of the performance while wearing a trademark orange jump suit, Krefting sat on the floor and played cassettes, Adris faced away from the audience and played a single cymbal – that it doesn’t quite fit the overarching free folk aesthetic that was the festival’s main conceptual thrust. Now, this, a vinyl reissue in an edition of only 500 copies – inevitably immediately sold out at source – that restores their elusive cassette on Polyamory (James Toth’s aka Wand’s great early imprint) from 1999 alongside their contribution to the Colour In Absence Sound compilation from the same year. Recorded at the same time as The Shadow Ring’s Lindus, The Rise Of Elklink magnifies and implodes the early narrative style of The Shadow Ring with a heavy air of suburban ennui somehow transformed into a series of ghostly transports that move well beyond simple sound poetry and into a form of composition that is intimately tied up with the body and the space around it, forsaking the formal satisfaction of poetry and ‘sense’ for a sound with endless subliminal depth, rich with an almost occult sense of implication, suggestion and otherworldly power. Recorded at home straight to four track the songs are accumulations of variously treated monologues and sounds that dissolve into rich miasmic fields of chatter and non-specific drone/environments in a way that owes as much to the work of Robert Ashley and Walter Marchetti as it does to Michigan noise. Indeed, the degree of acoustic/electric confusion is immediately disorientating, as body sounds break down into machine patterns, extraneous domestic sounds take on the form of voices and microphones record the speech of empty rooms. The atmosphere is similar to Whitehouse at points, though paradoxically enough it’s the early Come Org recordings that it most resembles, where Bennett’s vocals were almost impossible to fully decode. The generally malevolent air – which the deliberate breakdown of sense inevitably seems to conjure – also brings to mind the darker Nurse With Wound material like “I Was No Longer His Dominant” or “Fashioned To A Device Behind A Tree” although a more contemporary reference might be the amazingly disquieting series of recordings released by Relay For Death over the past year or so. And of course it has an umbilical straight to the profoundly alienated lost-in-the-fog aspect of the last few Shadow Ring recordings. With a guest appearance from The Shadow Ring’s Tim Goss and some absolutely gripping performances from Adris and Graham, trading vocals, blurring roles until each seem to be a degraded reflection of each other, this is one of the most remarkable, disturbing, impenetrably deep broadcasts from some of the key figures in contemporary underground music. File it alongside Lindus, Put My Dream On This Planet, Total Sex, Automatic Writing, Let’s Build A Pussy, Crowley’s cylinder recordings and Coil’s ELpH workings in the part of your collection reserved for modern classics. Highly recommended!
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