Sometimes a record comes along that is just so vast in terms of its scope and ambition that it jars up my cogs and completely prevents me from listening to anything else for weeks. Such a record is Peter Wright’s Snow Blind. I’ve been a fan of Wright for some time now; both live and on record, but nothing could have prepared me for this, not even someone holding a big sign aloft which read “Peter Wright is about to release a record so vast in scope and ambition that it will jar up your cogs”. Well, maybe that would have helped. But no-one did it, did they?

Peter Wright has been threatening to release Snow Blind for such a long time that it was beginning to acquire some sort of mythical status in his discography. This double CD, recorded in 2007 when New Zealander Wright was sojourning in London, seems to have taken its time to find a home: which is utterly bizarre given its absurdly high quality. Thankfully Install have now picked it up, although quantities are distressingly limited. In fact, I wouldn’t waste time reading the rest of the review. It’ll be a long one. Trust me; go there, buy one now, and then come back and finish this later. I’ll wait for you, honest.

Got one? Excellent, I’ll press on with disc one. It all begins with a most familiar sound to us Londoners: a drunk ranting while police sirens wail all around. From there, Wright combines abrasive Kevin Drumm drone, spooked Miasmah atmospherics, hazy shoegaze, dense Richard Skelton style composition, and even bursts of Godspeed guitar grandiosity to complete his masterpiece. Most of my favourite elements, then. ‘The Drunken Master In His Crumbling Citadel’ clears the drunk off the streets with some increasingly harsh and heavy feedback which falls like torrential rain by the end. Reverberating metallic rhythms, like distorted steel drums, lead into the long ambient organ drone of ‘Apakura‘, whose still surface occasionally dapples, briefly breaking up into luminous patterns. “Truth Serum” is constructed entirely from scrapes of whining guitar, and is dense, muffled and emotionally fraught. Following that, the building guitar strum of ‘Follow The Leader‘ couldn’t do more to signify an imminent eruption into huge white noise if it held aloft a big sign which read…um I’ve done this one already haven’t I? But when it finally comes, the ear-pummelling which follows is particularly intense, the sound is ravaged beyond all recognisability. Utterly excoriating.

The second disc begins with pulsating Spacemen 3 type ambience, before the oppressive, rainy, hissy atmospheres of ‘The Distopian National Anthem‘ descend; since hearing this, I’ve cancelled my forthcoming trip to Distopia, and am even considering suspending all diplomatic relations. ‘Cruise Missiles’ gently reprises ‘Akapura’ drone, being a mere calm before the torrential electric storm entitled (somewhat bizarrely, if no doubt truthfully) ‘With Teeth Like That You Can’t Help But Succeed‘. Brutally serrated fragments of guitar distortion crackle from the speakers, forming billowing clouds of skin-shredding metal. The album descends gently to a close with the restrained chord sequences of the title track, leaving you to reflect on the huge sonic experience that was Snow Blind the album, let your ears rest a little, then skip right back to the start of the first disc. Before you know it, you’ll have lost weeks of your life to this album. Don’t say no-one warned you.
90%

Peter Wright on Myspace

Originally posted on the mapsadaisical blog