“It’s like we all know way down in our souls that our generation is going to witness the end of everything. You can see it in our eyes. It’s in mine, look. I’m doomed.”
A sampled monologue from a Gregg Araki film I’ve never seen slithers through the hum of sustained guitar feedback. Between two thin slices of sprouted-wheat skramz, it’s peanut butter — creamy Peter Pan peanut butter to be exact: a textural, artificial emptiness that glues the organic disorder together. It might as well be anti-matter — Empty-full space — which just happens to be the title of this three-track, three-minute EP by emoviolence outfit La Nausée.
Named after a work of existentialist literature? Check. Album artwork haunted by ghost-like paintings and/or sketches? Double-check. Empty-full space is, by any emoviolence fan’s standards, a textbook release. But it works within genre conventions so well that it deserves some spilled ink.
An uncredited vocalist screams a free-verse poem on opener “Spacing dots.” It’s spoken from the perspective of a suitcase, while clean guitar riffs seem to emanate more pain than even the screeches do.
This record’s about the apocalypse. But it’s not the apocalypse you think it is, based on the sound.
The world ends with a blip, like a cathode ray tube turned off.
Shrinking an old box TV’s static to a penciled line with a singe button-press.
“You’ve already been replaced by others.”