You know when someone pitches something to you with the words ‘What the fuck is happening here? Experimental drone or something, you figure it out‘, you are automatically intrigued to find out. Such was the case with our full album premiere for today, and I have to say that curiosity didn’t kill the cat this time, but merely beheaded it, in essence.
Mother Anxiety is Ben Serna-Grey’s solitary expedition to human psyche, and started out as a voyage deep into the constitutions of a panic attack: a voyage that later evolved into an overwhelming cascade of hatred, misery, and exhaustion that calls for the utter eradication of those in power – both figuratively and literally. There’s no time like the present to advocate for a class war to demolish the modern bullshit constructs, and there’s no time like now to press play and stream Guillotine Age in its entirety from the embed below.
So, what the ever-loving fuck is happening here? Simply put, Mother Anxiety demonstrates the collision of analogic and digital worlds in an efflorescent and fluent fashion. Posed in a more convoluted sense, it does so by means of blending together an immense amount of genres all the way from drone and noise to glitch and folk, with no stones left unturned in between. You need to hear it to understand what kind of a unique beast Mother Anxiety is, and even then, comprehending it is another thing entirely. Guillotine Age offers you an experience – a chance to explore uncharted territories and the potential to discover things anew. What it doesn’t do, however, is give you any spelled-out answers or keys to unlock its hidden doors. You have to come up with and craft those yourself.
If there was a single word that’d perfectly encapsulate Guillotine Age, it’s exhilarating. You never know what’s waiting behind any of its innumerable corners, you never know what to expect, yet everything that transpires will fully enthral and consume you. From the folky atmosphere of the first track, “Morning Fog”, to the nightmare lullabies of “Victims of Capital”, to the bit-crushed noise barriers of “Flagburner” and evocative synthwave-laden, lo-fi glitch-beat-driven “Dragged Screaming From Your Mansions”, Mother Anxiety excels on its bold datum and delivers across the scope fused together from various stylistic leanings. The album’s impeccable ebb and flow is inviting, and once the absolute wrecker that is the titular closer track is finished, you’re inclined to hit replay instantly, much as I was. So to answer the question ‘What the fuck is happening here?‘, I can only nod and say the truth: everything.
Guillotine Age drops tomorrow via the UK-based experimental label Trepanation Recordings, and you can order the album from here. Be sure to hop in on the Mother Anxiety Instagram to stay up to date about his doings, and check the previous, equally mind-melting endeavours from the act’s Bandcamp page.
