When home studio technology became prevalent and a general zeitgeist of post modern despair continued to permeate the thought processes of most creative individuals, it seems like multitudes of people tried, with varying degrees of appeal, to deconstruct music for the purposes of achieving a new kind of rawness, or to continue the concept of stripping it down only to the elements that were most urgent. What resulted were more considered developments in doom, noise, breakcore, IDM, punk, black metal, no wave, and in some cases, industrial or minimal wave. The structures of music being dismantled down to a single buzz, or a simple clatter of mismanaged instruments, or unanimated lo-fi riffage, as it were, still could only be a means to an end. In my case at least, I can't hear everything that has ever been created in the world, but a lot of the 2000s seemed to largely produce such manic hybridism that was almost just as evocative as static white noise, or other even more exagerrated forms of obvious minimalism, if we are to disregard the forms of revivalism that came and went. An entire generation was influenced heavily by Mr. Bungle and Aphex Twin to create their own way of showing off how crazy they are.
Enter Blake Green's solo project, Aelter: A type of music that builds entire kingdoms out of sand in the desert, not as a formula, but as a natural departure for an organism whose innate properties almost created itself. Esqueing simple crudeness and dread, his 2nd release Follow You Beloved seems like an epic doom album that Ennio Morricone would have tried to write, with a kind of wall-of-sound production used to make the feeling of emptiness paradoxically thick and omnipresent. The LP has swelling strings and swooning choirs, and clean vocals whose lyrics are only obscured by their soft, quaint, melancholia; A sort of makeshift romanticism that is both meditative and base, without any Victorian histrionics.
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