Around a week and a half ago, the Russian sound artist known as Sweet Random issued a new EP, Untold, which, following by a few months his first, Love, and constituting just as much of a unity as it did, does indeed (to respond to its title) deserve to be talked about.
On his Soundcloud page, Sweet Random has also uploaded the EP in its brief entirety (it is around fifteen minutes long) and it’s from there that I’ll simply embed it whole here.
The arrangements of this music bring some distinctively bleak and even novel complexes of sound to bear, and that alone would furnish a reason to listen to the album; but it’s something else which really elicits one’s attention – the feeling that here one is transfixed in some confined space and, moreover, feels oneself to be nearly depleted, so that in the end there’s not much that could be done about it: so perhaps it’s this EP’s aim to describe a state of exhaustion that is more than a merely individual one.
That the musical referent is our present circumstances generally (note that here I am not speaking of conditions in any country in particular), seems especially likely when one listens to the last track on the EP, “Digital War”: for, if one concentrates on it, and then replays the other three as well, one might well register throughout something as definite as the sound of a wish or a hope, namely, that the decrepit impasse of today’s arrangements somehow be swept away by others that would at least possess the virtue of being new or younger – “qu’une sorte de flot irrésistible passera sur l’ancienne civilisation,” to cite one especially cutting sentence of Georges Sorel’s (Réflexions sur la violence, deuxième édition, chap. IV, pt. II) which remains, much like his book as a whole, as current as it was when first published, already more than a century ago.
Postscript. The album has been removed from the Soundcloud page of the artist – now renamed Unhunt – but it is still available on his Bandcamp page, and I’ll embed it again from that source.
