CH0 0:00:01 [LP]

VS--55 - CH0 0:00:01 [LP]

CH0 0:00:01 is the latest dispatch from VS--55, the ongoing collaborative project led by Jonas Ronnberg, the Swedish electronic musician, producer, label founder, and artist also known as Varg2™. The band recorded the album while living at The Foundry, the experimental art space housed in a 19th-century armaments and military equipment factory on the edge of the French Pyrenees.

CH0 0:00:01 is an abstract collection of vaporous fragments and humming frequencies, “anti-music” captured primarily through a deconstructed cinema organ, layered and sequenced to visceral effect, akin to stumbling upon absurd and unsettling surveillance footage. There is very little instrumentation; moments of barely-there guitar, piano, and vocals churn under the album’s central engine, a French cinema organ propped next to air compressors and a Sony cassette dictaphone, all run into a giant club sound system.

Opener "Laughter" establishes the tone, a disorienting buzz. "Poison Tits" drifts between angelic whispers and reptilian growls, "Chechny Crude Oil" follows a spoken word through corridors of sludge, and cathartic standout "Crawler" sets rapid-fire whispers and sighs against a booming, punishing pulse. A slow march of distortion dissipates on closing track "F-04 Dissolve", leaving only plaintive keys adrift.