Personally, I’ve always found it hard to appreciate music that is pure noise. Something about the lack of structure and form makes it hard for my mind to wrap itself around. But, every once and a while there are a few releases of this experimental genre that digs in my brain like a nasty ear worm. This Polish project known simply as 273 have a collection of these ear worms, ranging in different sounds and textures that drag the psyche to a place in between music and harsh noise. This release in particular, Wheel Wood Sun, I personally found to have the most structure out of the different releases.
This release is meant to be listened to as a whole hour long piece consisting of a mix of drums, bass, and a plethora of noises ranging from harsh synthesizer noises to glass and metal scraping and clanging against one another created a foggy haze over the instruments themselves. Pushing passed the haze you’ll find a pattern of furious drums and rather psychedelic and psychotic bass lines that are rather hard to pick up unless paying close attention as the forefront of music is the harsh noise. There’s something to really admire about this approach as it really challenges the listener to question what exactly makes up music. Stripping back the song structure and writing to create pure, unadulterated force that is accompanied by a bass and drums keeping some sorta rhythm going.
This is a very dense album, the hour feels sluggish as you wade through the marsh of noise presented to you here. Certainly a release that, if let played in the background, certain moments will shine through the white noise. A bass lick that jumps out here or there, or a drum pattern that is repeated in a way that makes it extremely catchy. If you’re the type who enjoys listening to an album from front to back in one sitting, you might find your self struggling to get through the whole thing just like how I found my self with this. But once I took the album out of focus and let it run its course, I found my self being drawn back to it, almost astonished by what some would call ‘creativity’ but others would call ‘chaos’. Personally, I find that true creativity is spawned in chaos, and I find that the artist here certainly lets loose his creative force.
I’m not going to try and convince you that this is true music, or that its even music at all. I still struggle to wrap my head around these things as I’ve stated before, but I found this to be an interesting listen either way, a step in the harsher direction perhaps. Would recommend this to those who are already comfortable and familiar with this style of music, but nonetheless give it a shot anyways, you might be surprised by what you find.