Around the same time that Nine Inch Nails broke industrial music in the American mainstream (ie. the early 90s), groups like Britain’s greatly underappreciated Seefeel were incorporating post-rock’s quiet grandeur into electronica backdrops. The result was something driving, rhythmic, and pensive all at once, like reading a book about gardening tips while Primal Scream and Slowdive duke it out on dueling festival stages.
Unlike NIN, Ministry, and their ilk, there was no aggression; just a plaintive, simple beat surrounded by swirling guitars and the occasional vocal flitting about. Somewhere between these two interpretations of industrial’s insistent throb lies the new single from the recently-established Age of Life, a side project from Collapse Under the Empire‘s head honcho Chris Burda.
Collapse Under the Sun have been going for nearly 20 years now; had Burda decided to launch Age of Life sooner when he had less experience, it likely wouldn’t have the massive scale of this new song, titled “Cambrian Pulse”. While not too different on the surface from what his long-running main squeeze sounds like, he takes its cinematic post-rock style and pumps it up with touches more akin to the aforementioned heavier industrial groups. The bumping electronics at the beginning are already enough to get the listener tapping their toes, but the stop-start guitar riffs that come in afterwards could’ve been taken right from The Downward Spiral. At the halfway point, in comes a Phantom of the Opera-esque synth organ part that ups the drama considerably.
As Burda puts it: ‘The result is a layered soundscape where melancholy and momentum coexist, creating a cinematic atmosphere that is both introspective and expansive’. This thematic connection comes through in “Cambrian Pulse” even though there are no words: much like fellow science nerds The Ocean, an exemplary job is done in recreating the aura of a major ecological era in musical form. There’s something mysterious and otherworldly about Age of Life‘s compositional qualities, as if one is staring through a grey dust cloud in the aftermath of a certain explosion that occurred about 538.8 million years ago. The ending, a clever variant on a post-rock crescendo but with digital reverberations pushing it forward, is perfectly timed and executed, the dancing and pondering having reached their final convergence before shaking scaly hands and departing.
In Burda’s own words, “Cambrian Pulse” serves as ‘another step in a larger body of work that will gradually evolve over the course of one and a half years‘. Whether this means that Age of Life is only going to be a temporary project, or that it’ll take 18 months for a full album to arrive, I’ll be listening for the next taste. Follow the project on Instagram. “Cambrian Pulse” releases officially on April 23rd; let’s help get him to that year-and-a-half mark and beyond.
