2/15/2021

Tescon Pol — Gai Lan

 

Tescon Pol, a duo consisting of Ariel Johannessen and Mic Finger, invite their audience on a long sonic journey through their new album Gai Lan, which merges a dozen of musical styles together into a unique combination.

Each of the ten tracks, being six minutes long on average, creates its own glitchy soundscape, that is thrilling and sometimes frightening to wander around. The sound of Tescon Pol is reminiscent of Download’s experiments with IDM and EBM, but their tracks are more repetitive, and this is probably due to the rhythmic noise and illbient influence that can be heard on Myriapoda, Cathodica and Gailan through various sonic stratums. The images they invoke are not murky or industrial, instead they are integrated into techno-biological sonic fiction ensembles. The album itself could be lived through as a post-futuristic trip into a closed-circuit system, analogous to the world we inhabit, no matter how open it may seem.

This can be illustrated through the most intriguing tracks of the album, those that feature Mic Finger’s vocals, gentle and detached at the same time. They definitely share some distinct late Coil vibes with the musical pieces of their contemporary, Sam Shackleton, and also help one better grasp the overall feeling that the album conveys. These tracks add to the techno-biological sonic imaginaries (one could go as far as to assume that Gai Lan itself, being Chinese broccoli, is a witty nod to Coil’s track Broccoli that transplants it into a new, uncanonical cyberpunk context), but they lack Coil’s feeling of transcendentality. In Coil’s world one would dissociate and go to the next level (technology being the accelerator of this ascent), whereas in post-Coil works, Gai Lan being one the examples, one is drowning in an endless stream of sonic intensities, that have no other meaning but the transmission itself. The voice is the derivative of this movement, emerging only accidentally and murmuring some abstract lines, in which one wants to hear a promise for a spiritual transformation.


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