Grim Repeater is a virtually unknown band/artist (I myself am unsure of which one is more accurate) with a small bandcamp page which I found by chance. I don’t remember what were the circumstances for me to stumble into this album, but I’m glad I did.
This is the first record I’ve heard from them, and the only other one I’ve listened from them is Transparency One (which I probably won’t write about since I didn’t find it as memorable as their first record on the series - but hope to hear what they have to offer in the future).
The EP only has six songs, totalling out eighteen minutes and forty two seconds (18:42) of music.
The tracklist:
Venetian Blinds
Gods Bathtub
Backseat Friends
Leap Year
Self Deception
Dream House
Venetian Blinds
is a rather interesting opening track, it begins calm with tranquil synths with a background white-noise and a discreet bass playing on the low notes and serving as a form of percussion and rhythm to an otherwise freeform song.
The synths swell brighter and brighter until they burst into a brighter synth, changing a bit the tone of the song but continuing with the almost wave-like motion the tracks bring with it. A brass synth swells closer to the end of the track, following the calmer and brighter synth’s tone while the bass keeps pounding quietly on the background.
The song continues to swell to an apex, which then starts to deflate, the brass is muffled slowly together with all of the bass of the song, finishing off as it started, with the tranquil and bright synths and the white noise - like waves in venetia - on the background.
Gods Bathtub
this track reminds me of a different track by disasterpeace - named flow, which he produced for the OST for FEZ - with its playful lead plucks accompanied by the sound of water flowing on the background. The plucks swell slowly, being followed by a few other, more percussive sounds. The song then explodes in a breath of different sounds, synths, pads, percussion instruments, meanwhile the main plucks morph and keep swelling until the song’s Apex, in which then the whole song sustains itself, the plucks ever present with a multitude of pads surrounding everything. It then starts to deflate to the end of the song, the percussion returning with the muffling of the main plucks, finally ending with the pads and the sound of the water dominating the track.
Backseat Friends
the track starts with bright brass quickly swelling to an ethereal chorus and pads surrounding the song, and maintains a constant flow between swelling and receding until a major swell boosts the brightness of the brass for a couple moments, receding then again to the usual montions, and this as well becomes a constant back and forth, all meanwhile the chorus and pads keep their usual motions, as the brass recedes back again to a muffled, almost inaudible quality, as the pads and vocals recede as well, leaving only the muffled brass in the background.
Leap Year
bright and happy synths are the lead-in for the song, setting a rhythmical pattern to an ebb and flow from the pads and brass that follows it right afterwards, and then the lead bass hits, contrasting and following the chorus of the pads in a constant rise and fall of synthetic instruments, until the song starts muting and muffling a few of the instruments, ending as if the song itself was biting farewell.
Self Deception
the track starts playing weird binaural beats and a fairly central bass, giving an uneasy tone right from the start, quickly being followed by a few vocal clips of a feminine voice spousing a few lines full of machismo, saying things such as “I’m not feminine at all, I’m alpha male with huge confidence” with a clear distorted echo following each line, as the unease of a song keeps swelling further and further, the voice becoming harder and harder to listen to, until the instrumentations starts to wane and the lines are able to be better discerned. The track ends with the strange binaural beats and the distorted beats waning on the background.
Dream House
it is immediately apparent how different this song is, even with the swelling of brass and synth being still a big part of the song itself, the drums set a fairly different tone, as well as the vocal performance.
The lyrics are very poetic, and narrate a wandering through a “House of Dreams” which is giant and made “of tall grey stone” which “nobody calls it home”. Its a fairly ethereal - as the rest of the songs were - experience, and the lyrics bring a fairly new taste to the instrumentation, which swells and explodes with a lot more energy than the other songs did, partially due as well to the drums that are absent in all other tracks.
This is one of my favourite albums, each song brings a motif and a different theme, even if their structures are fairly similar on paper, in practice its an unique mental palace that permeates each track, a different vista or a different smell, it is full of soul in each note, in the combination of pads and synths and brass and a few percussives here and there, and each theme is strongly communicated by the tracks’ textures and their titles.
The album’s description is “Ambient piece for self reflection / conception / deception / projection / rejection / recollection / consideration / interpretation / identification / feminization / justification / consolidation / consummation / degeneration” and I feel like it achieves what is set out to do, be a reflexive and conceptual EP, bringing you to a different wave of meditation before crashing down like a wave on the beach.
It is a truly lovely piece of ambient music and thoroughly recommend you to take a listen. You can find the album at: https://grimrepeater.bandcamp.com/album/transparency-zero