Collaborator

Album review

Well, this one doesn't fit in any "middle of the road" rock niches or musical genres most are familiar with. Call it goth-ambient. Djam Karet have a wide taste of influences and are musically diverse and very capable in their own compositions. Their augmentations of DAT pre-recorded sound sculptures are incredibly well envisioned and deftly executed. Gayle Ellet, Henry J. Osborne, and Mike Henderson bring subterranean, submarine, and otherworldly sounds out to the light. What stands before the listener is fever-dreamed, phantasmic, eerie, and at times unsettling. Think soundtrack, hear haunted and looming presences. This stuff does not relieve paranoid dementia. Look at these titles if you don't understand: "Solar Flare," "Gondwanaland," "The Anointing of the Sick," "The Day After," "Foreign Lesion." "The 17th Karmapa" holds a gigantic tuning fork against your throbbing skull and oscillates on overload. Drift in an ebony sea on the forbidden planet with "Moorings" or wash up on the shores of lost kingdoms of "Cliff Spirits." The Great Deafening god approaches you in "Submersion," and then you are pulled beneath the sepulchres of Atlantis by "Food Chain" and left for dead as the band plays on. "Salt Road" is an astral trip through the Ganges to Nirvana. Collaborator then decimates sanity as Cthulhu rises from the sunken cities of "The Fearful Void." If you like your ambience dark, brooding, noisome, and draining, then Collaborator is for you. The collaborators are Marc Anderson, percussionist of Steve Tibbetts fame, Jeff Greinke, Walter Holland, Loren Nerell, Steve Roach, Kit Watkins of Happy the Man, and Carl Weingarten, with Djam Karet adding treatments to each artist's original composition.
© John W. Patterson /TiVo