Ichtyor Tides - Mortisle Elytrion

Artist: Ichtyor Tides

CD Title: Mortisle Elytrion

Genre: Noise, Drone, Industrial

Date: 6-16-13

I decided to listen to this album, Mortisle Elytrion by Ichtyor Tides, because I thought they had the best name of everyone on the review list.  On that, I have not wavered in my opinion.

The good:  Beautiful cover art.  Interesting name.  Interesting song titles.

The bad:  Everything else.

This is not music, but might be good as a soundtrack for a role playing game or for a horror movie.  You could easily write a science fiction role playing scenario using each of these themes as background noise and create a horrifying atmosphere.  And it's great that it has this potential, because if you listen to this from a musical perspective, this album is complete and utter awful.

I remember purchasing Mike Patton's Adult Themes For Voice, back when fifteen dollars for a CD was a big deal to me and back before we had Youtube to screen out terrible music.  From a musical perspective, it was also awful.  It was atonal, non-musical, and basically consisted of noise divided under uninspiring titles such as "A Leper with the Face of a Baby Girl", "A Smile, A Slap in the Face, A Fart, A Kiss on the Mouth", and "Robot Sex" (Neon and B/W, to clarify).  It wasn't music, and as inured to Mike Patton's musical talents evidenced by his work with Faith No More and Mr. Bungle, I felt a little betrayed by the purchase.  Fifteen dollars at the local Silver Platters, after all, was four, nearly five, #1 Value Meals at McDonald's at the time.

Mortisle Elytrion takes the same approach and intensifies the agony.  There are now three dogs dropping awful here rather than one, led by one harried dogwalker who's had a bad day and is running out of little plastic bags.  There are no musical elements to this CD.  Nothing is musical here.  Perhaps this is true industrial - the fanciful sounds of a factory, endlessly stamping out hundreds of the same product, all to the tune of the same four-note sound effect pattern endlessly repeated over and over again.  There are no variations, no progressions.  Perhaps the lyrics are really well written?  I would be impressed by well written lyrics.  I concede that I don't speak French well enough to judge them.

I literally don't know how someone could listen to this and enjoy it.  Can someone help me with this?  Are there really a subgenre of people who INTENTLY listen to this and enjoy it?  And if so, what part of their humanity must have been removed to make it so?

If that's you, can you please give this album another review?  I'm not hearing whatever it is that I'm supposed to hear.

I take notes as I listen to the music, here listed below.  Usually I take my notes and then rewrite them into what looks like a coherent narrative.  This time, I refuse.  I'm not going to attempt to turn them into an actual narrative; there is no point.

I apologize for the terse and blunt nature of my review.  I testify that I have tried to spin it as positively as I could, and have succeeded in doing so.  This is the result.

* - for each use of the word 'awful' here in this review, I had initially substituted a more direct term, a noun rather than an adjective, but I decided to replace it to keep my reviews family friendly.

"Insulffee" - 2:12 of static

"Wooise Perkage" - awful.  Nothing more to say.

"PQRSux" - Good sound effects on the lead singer's voice.  Well produced awful.

"Ventide" - I thought it was going to be interesting with the background sound sounding like wind, but then it turned out to be the same static bullshit we'd heard on the last 3 songs.

"Soreilles Guines" - I really like the titles of these songs.  Too bad I don't like the songs.  Or whatever they're called.  I don't know what to call them, because it's not music.

"BM" - Bowel movement.  More rhythmic than the rest of the tracks so far.  Repetitive, obnoxiously so. "Alchemo" - I am trying to write other parts to this review while listening to this and it's just static in my ears.  If I heard this sound on the jobsite, I would demand hearing protection; and if denied, I would have a legitimate lawsuit against my employer.

"Suaval" - He sounds quite suave here, after all.  And again, the vocal effects - reverb and equalization, mainly - are well placed and well recorded.  The opening percussion drags on.  It's three minutes of the same sound, with almost no variation whatsoever.

"Drongle" - Opens with promising tonal sounds.  At this point, I'm willing to accept anything that sounds like a musical sound.  But it descends into the same repetitive noise that plagued the rest of the album.  "Yole Exitore" - More vocals, although now I'm growing tired of them.  There are no notes.  There is no singing, no vocals.  Although the end almost sounds a little bit musical.  Sort of.  I'm dying for it by this point.

"Exiphannist Plunge" - SIXTEEN MINUTES?  The opening sounds nice, with the rainfall and all.  The synths or whatever they are start up at about 1:00 in and then continue for another fourteen minutes or so.  Somewhere in the mix you start to hear what sounds like a Hammond organ, which would be cool if it weren't wasted amid a mess of noise and static.  And then the song's over, sounding exactly the same as it did before.

Take a Listen to: Wooise Perkage