Darksmith’s body of work is in large part defined by juxtaposition, stark contrasts between often oxymoronic concepts—light and dark, comfort and unease, the familiar and the uncanny. End of Life, perhaps a sequel of sorts to the artist’s last Second Sleep LP Hatred of Sound, memorably begins with one such paradox: the reverberating peal of a ringing knell is spread across tapes frayed so thin they seem to disintegrate in real time, draping a gauze shroud fit for funeral rites… death, for all its weight and ubiquity in virtually every aspect of our existence, is a weak, sickly thing, arriving with only quiet gasps or soiled undergarments as its fanfare. Mortality is not a novel element in the San Francisco stalwart’s music, but it hasn’t been this salient until now, and the implications are less than reassuring. Appropriately, this new full-length features some of Darksmith’s most frail and insubstantial collages yet, each full of spidery details that only reveal themselves when heard in a silent, shadowed room. The hollow concrète specters that haunted Collapse are resurrected throughout—amplifications of the empty space between voice/vitality and vacuum/void. There’s also a curious throughline of musical sampling, which features most prominently in the closing track that comprises side B. Distorted rasps, distant metallic screeches, and other ephemera orbit the suspiciously cozy 4/4 loop (the source of which I’ve yet to identify) in a telescoping tunnel of nocturnal texture, a leisurely hearse cruise toward a conclusion that sounds like the poorly maintained subterranean infrastructure of existence itself. Stark, bleak, and, of course, masterful; one expects no less from a Darksmith record.
Noise Not Music 