It never feels inaccurate to call Rhizome Weaver’s sprawling texture-feasts “walls” even as they shift and splinter with a sinewy restlessness, because the essentials are all there: the crushing initial blast, the lush crackle interwoven with rumbling low end, the immobilizing hypnosis. This refreshing new German project from Silken Heart co-founder Lukas Gerhmann brings to mind several points of comparison—Kakerlak’s recent work, Nascitari’s Your Sewer / My Church, the cosmic crumble of Train Cemetery—but there isn’t anything else quite like it, which is the greenest of flags, especially these days. Amidst the hyperbolic (though endearing) release description for You Are Not Sorry Enough, one phrase stands out: “a sea of granite incrementally surging and receding.” The coarse, crystallized igneous rock is an apt analogy for the forces at work here. Each track is both monolithic and constantly in flux, breaking apart into the magma only to reform seconds later. “Urn Stock” is a great example. Settle in for its nine minutes and find that it never lands at an equilibrium point. This low frequency range falls out and then slams back in again, that high one trembles between the stereo channels, until it all sputters out into near-nothingness… and then “Arche Fossil” erupts and obliterates what’s left. Despite all the primordial imagery, however, the energy Gerhmann harnesses is not just the slow, indifferent flow of nature but also that of his own scrambling human hands, and the result is a raw volatility that I can’t get enough of. It’s hard to tell whether this material emerged out of an analog or digital setup (or some blend of both), but intense live footage makes clear that Rhizome Weaver is grounded in tactility, in all its smashing, crashing glory.
Noise Not Music 