EtudeRecords

Lngtché's Music for an untitled film by T. Zärkkof is a continuous, evolving drone whose myriad parts revolve around each other like a mobile. A superb example of dark drone music, Music... is one 44-minute track, clearly divided into two loud, reverberent sections, separated by several minutes of quiet, ambient noise. The work uses long, metallic tones, without any semblance of melody, almost like feedback, to create an unsettled feeling and withholding any sense of resolution. Lngtché also scrupulously avoids any sense of a pulse, preferring a slow sonic evolution. The feedback is almost always in combination with some kind of deep bass drone and several quiet layers of noise. Occasionally Lngtché will include some glimmer of sound which one can trace to an instrument in the real world. A couple of the sounds could have originated on an electric guitar, and occasionally one hears some kind of ritual percussion, but most often his work shows no signs of the elements from which it was constructed. The layered construction gives the work considerable depth, illuminating successive listenings from the hidden details.
The various sections of the work move seamlessly from one to the next. One of the thematic elements in the first part of the piece is water, whose occasional appearance and disappearance is one of the few sudden transitions in the piece. In the second half, an ominous bass tone appears like a call of some kind of weird, subterranean creature, expanding with white noise to fill the entire audible spectrum, leaving only slight hints of something else going on just underneath the surface. The piece concludes with an abrupt transition to very quiet white noise, almost as if the listener started changing the channel on the radio and settled for the ghost noise between the stations, with only an occasional digital heartbeat to signal any kind of motion.
Lngtché is a project of the Spanish composer Pau Torres, and the work appears on Etude Records, a small label from Barcelona. Although the project is named for the Chinese execution method of death by a thousand cuts, one of the more gruesome tortures ever devised, the piece never veers into anything equivalently harsh. We also get no clue about the film for which the music is the soundtrack because all of the cover art is by Seldon Hunt, an artist who has done numerous covers for various doom metal groups such as sunn0))). Divorced from any external context, the listener is left with the sounds as they are, slowly revolving and dreaming through time.

-Caleb Deupree

Don't confuse Lngtché with the similarly-named Belgian grindcore band—at this point, this project is much more evocative of the Chinese "death by a thousand cuts." The album is one long ambient track, but it's supremely uneasy listening: a wash of sound that turns out to be a minefield of razor blades. No idea who Zarkkof is (Google's suggestion: a figment of the imagination), but the film part is dead-on. This album perfectly captures the mechanical brooding of the house scenes in David Lynch's Lost Highway. 44 minutes of quiet feedback, dirty water, and distant warplanes conjure up a presence otherworldly, yet threateningly omnipresent. Seldon Hunt wraps the package in absolutely stunning triptych CGI art.

-Left Hand Path

With an emphasis on falling water, rusted hinge noise, and bursts of reverberant guitar, “Music for an Untitled Film by T. Zarkoff” falls pretty squarely in the “dark ambient” zone of which I’m generally not a big fan. Still, Lngtche manages to bring some new sounds to the disc, easily conjuring pictures of large engines gearing up amidst a Kowloon Walled City-type setting.And the work is quite visual, surely more so for listeners more inclined in this direction than myself. At times I’m almost tempted to believe Lngtche captured some of these sounds “on the set;” sampling from some impossible conglomeration of afterburners, howling wind, and electronic disarray T. Zarkoff has turned his camera towards.
Throughout, the quality of the disc is high, with no technical mistakes to cut in on my imagination’s wandering. I also appreciate the efforts that have been taken with the dynamics of the work, which is pleasingly spatial and sounds nice in a quiet room. Personally, though, I can’t see this as a disc that I’ll be listening to over and over. I think that one’s own “use” of music may ultimately be the deciding factor on this disc’s worth. Lngtche has presented a work long on mood and ambiance, and that will be quite compelling for some; but it’s also a bit light on greater ideas, which leaves me wanting.

-Dave X Starling Moniker