Inside The Noise Floor: Flux Hound — Blood Tuning (SUB005)
Flux Hound’s third LP, the brooding Blood Tuning, functions as an open-ended interpretation of the human blood flow — a bleak, darkened world underpinned by a heavy jazz soundtrack.
Blood Tuning isn’t about love and heartbreak — Flux Hound are not in the greeting card game. Blood Tuning is about flow. The great internal river. The crash and bash of the rouge machine we cart around without a second thought. Until it malfunctions. Stutters. Screams. Then we think about it.
Unlike Flux Hound’s first two albums Demolished Man and The Numb Sermon, Blood Tuning is built from pulse, with the band members (Zachery Bryan, Stewart McClure, Fisher Evans, Ezra Columbus, Virgil Brock, James Tagg) spending months studying their own circulation. With an arsenal of stethoscopes, doppler mics, and hissing amplifiers, each member was able to clearly record their own circulation over an extended period, and commit the findings into a “Blood Journal”.
“I think the overarching theme we all seemed to agree on was that there is zero melody in our blood’s ecosystem, but there the tightening and release of pressure, surge and return, surge and return, an entire rhythm of its own accord.”
Recorded in an “acoustically disastrous” atmosphere in central Mexico on an extended visit to Substatik HQ, the album structure seeded in fragments, often only coming to fruition during the recording itself — the body as the instrument turning the cardiovascular system into a score. To achieve this, each individual instrument had to be allocated to a specific component of the circulatory system. The Fisher Evans bass became the arteries. Thick. Slow. Reliable. The Zachery Bryan/Stewart McClure guitar combo handled the winding, expressive veins of the album, carrying all it could back home. The Ezra Columbus piano/Moog meld played the plasma — that pale transmission medium keeping it all moving. The drums were an obvious choice… the heartbeat.
A science exists within the machinations of Blood Tuning, yes, but there’s poetry too, with parts of the album sounding like anatomy discovering its own soundtrack. Every track mirrors the push and pull of circulation: the initial rush of oxygen as heard on the chaotic opening track Blood Tuning. Track 2, the intangible V.Vein, is the trade-off in the capillaries, the slow collapse of spent energy returning to the source. It’s all so stupidly esoteric!
“There’s a kind of secular holiness to the whole project, not mystical, but a sacred physicality confessing all and sundry to a universe that refuses to forgive.”
Track 4, O+, is pure kinetic devotion. You can feel it in your temples, this internal thunder that is relentlessly unsatisfied. And with each piece conjoined with the next by an ugly, obnoxious heartbeat, it isn’t too long before the listener stumbles onto Black Lung Fugue. Wow. This is the albums heaviest, slowest, most drone-induced moment, and the only track to feature vocals. Recording from his home studio in Düsseldorf, Germany, Schlüsselchrist vocalist Vinnie Berlin hits primeval beast mode with a roaring, thunderous rapture reserved only for the most apocalyptic armageddon. This is the midpoint of the human life cycle, when the circulatory system begins glitching for the first time, and the once carefree, youthful human begins philosophizing on life, death, and the nothingness in between. Let’s call this the soundtrack for the autumn years.
On occasion, Blood Tuning feels like the crisp, dark jazz that Flux Hound have become renowned for… on occasion. This allows the listener a fortuitous breather before the entropic chaos to come. And by the final track, Tuning Blood, with its wayward sax, melted electronics, and off-kilter-out-of-time everything, it becomes quite apparent that there was zero chase for beauty by this unusual sextet, instead choosing to wait for it to appear.
And for the album’s final lurch, a crescendo of epic, god-awful noise followed by that damn discombobulating heartbeat, quicksanded by the slurping sounds of the plasma that gives us life in the first place. Poetry in motion? Hell no. A cold anatomical observation bordering on degradation… probably.
Within this cacophonic bliss is a lesson: without pressure, without rhythm, without flow and release, we are nothing. And Flux Hound? After a delve into the collapse of the superego for their first album, a tour of the life cycle of a heroin addict for album two, and an instrumental science experiment representing the human circulation system, god only know what could be coming next. One thing’s for certain, the journey will be spectacular.
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