Inside The Noise Floor: Flux hound — the numb sermon (SUB004)
Jazzster freaks Flux Hound have suffered their fair share of adversity, none expressed quite so eloquently as on their second LP The Numb Sermon.
There’s a certain hour in this wretched city where everything smells burnt and all is wrong. The stink on the fingertips, the taste of metal in the teeth, a pressure in the ribs that drives a man forward in his quest to fall two steps behind. Witching hour, Melbourne style. When nocturnes come to play and mainline vacancy is at a premium. Heroin. This is the hour The Numb Sermon lives in.
As with their 2016 debut Demolished Man (SUB002) Flux Hound (Zachery Bryan and Digger McClure on guitars, Fisher Evans on bass, Ezra Columbus at the keys, Virgil Brock on sax, and Jimbo Tagg as the percussionist) have constructed a soundscape designed not to appease, but to represent. As Demolished Man tracked the collapse of the superego in a struggling middle-aged man, so to does The Numb Sermon track, this time the life cycle of a heroin addict.
“We wanted to develop a cohesive, instrumental sound that represents a junkie’s body wasting by degrees, dragging itself across the lifetime of another day. A body begging for just one more fix to shut the world off for a while. No lesson, no moral, just the barebones.”
The “Numb” sessions took place in Wax Studios in the gritty inner-city Melbourne suburb of Richmond, a mere block away from the infamous heroin hotspot Lennox and Victoria. The band requested the already minuscule studio be made to feel tiny, cramped, claustrophobic, stale and sweaty. Conversation kept to a minimum, instruments tuned to collapse. The sole importance was the pulse emanating from the instruments, a pulse that can only be manufactured in a stifling environment.
That stifling tension shines through on the record with aplomb, often rendering the listener uncomfortable, yet giddy as to what may lurk around the corner. The releases are quick, fleeting, hanging around just long enough to seduce, but in a flash it’s gone, replaced by the long, wounded crawl of building tension, ending in just the way a junkie ends — abruptly, without fuss, with the quiet realization that nothing has changed and the void left by its previous occupant will be replaced double-time.
Amid the noise exists a rhythm that has no business existing within music. It doesn’t belong. Just like the pulse in the neck during heroin withdrawal, the tremor in the wrist, the fractured countdown between use and the next use. A looping liturgy, an impatient hymn to the great slowdown.
Flux Hound navigate this territory with real-world experience, offering no judgement of the subject matter, holding the addict’s truth without comment. The collapse is honored with discipline, respecting the body’s testimony more than any moral stance a listener might bring to the table. A junk prayer? No. This ain’t no Burroughs novel. More the documentation of a body in negotiation with its own demise.
Spending almost a decade tracing the curve of addiction with his own addiction, Zachery Bryan wisely logged each aching moment, in case he “may need it one day”.
“I consider myself blessed, not for having experienced heroin addiction, believe me, I regret everything, but for having the wherewithal to carry a journal with me everywhere I went. I recommend this for every junkie. Keep a journal kids! One day it may set you free.”
From his detailed journal, Zach was able to study his every machination: how and when the pulse slows, how sound blurs at high dosage, the magnificence of an unsustainable euphoria, the poignance of a lengthy, undesirable slump. Reading his notes it all seems so simple, but simplicity can be biblical when pain demands repetition.
Looking back on Flux Hound’s career, it’s obvious that they have been obsessed with function right from the drop. Yet a compassion for the protagonist seeps through, a rarity for an album focusing on mechanics over emotion. Whilst the music may be precise in its decay, it remains beautiful in its detached transformation, providing a quiet awe for the human capacity to self-destruct in 5/4 time.
And the ending? Well, of course it ends in the exact same way as it began — uneven footsteps stumbling along the cracked sidewalk to the promised land, the drug dealer. The band members refuse to clarify the meaning of such an atrocity, but I take it to mean that this is the new junkie treading the same path as the protagonist who has died, thus repeating the cycle. But that’s just me.
The Numb Sermon can be purchased via Bandcamp (includes artwork and liner notes) or streamed everywhere else.
Flux Hound’s complete discography is available on Bandcamp for 30% discount.
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