There is a vastness and complexity to this sound environment, and a jarring effect from stapling together dissonant sounds. The Berlin-based electronic producer makes soundscapes fraught with tension and sharp edges, on top of which the beats turn relentless.
His last full-length album, 2015’s Piteous Gate, was particularly harsh in its sporadic abstractions. With this album, M.E.S.H. surveys his previous work and begins to construct active expansive environments from the shard-like sounds.
Hesaitix opens with ‘Nemorum Incola’, and we plummet into a dark space that expands, lurches and lengthens as we learn the parameters of the soundscape. The album as a whole opens itself up to the concept album format – entertaining subtler abjections and in the process reconstructing a jarring version of club music. It’s as if club music itself were dissociating.
The most bizarre and gripping track, ‘Search. Reveal.’, is the axis the rest of the album spins around. White noise is pumped in. The sounds make up a lurching, growing, living landscape, as they are thrown around and reverberated. It’s hypnotic to be roped in for the ride.
The deconstructed club sound is common to his fellow Janus labelmates, but M.E.S.H. seems to have always had a foot in noisy experimental electronic, with a knack for evoking discomfort. In his previous productions, M.E.S.H. teases rhythms and beats that make you dance, then cuts them off and deconstructs them until they’re unrecognisable. He takes sly left turns that veer away from familiarity through repetition, that only leaves you wanting more. The point was never to sustain the listener.
Hesaitix has a more refined quality to it, more confident. It creates spaces for you to exist in temporarily – or be trapped in, which is my theory. It’s like being in a warehouse rave, but in absolute darkness, with powerful flashes of sound that evoke the effect of searchlights
The last track on Hesaitix – ‘Ihnaemiauimx’ – is unusually soft. It’s not mellow exactly, but tentative in effect, tying up loose ends. The album feels like a move away from pure sound art towards a fuller experience. In this transition from experimental noise that revels in randomness and discomfort, the album layers sound into intense, hypnotic rhythms that reveal compositional prowess.
