4 out of 5

Label: Ectopic Ents

Produced by: J.G. Thirlwell

There’s surely some deeper study to be made of the Manorexia album titles’ focus on algae and plankton and their environs. With J.G. Thirlwell’s fourth outing under the pseudonym, the album imagery seems to focus around medicine and the human body – injuries, syringes – while the album name, Dinoflagellate Blooms, may refer to a harmful collection of the titular plankton, which presents as a red “bloom” of algae, coloring its waters. Song names thread vaguely through this, referencing a human made “bloom” of sorts – if we assume that ‘A Plastic Island In The Pacific’ is a nod to Garbage Island – and sifting between diseases and decay (‘Vika,’ ‘Anabiosis’) and further man-made atrocities (‘Ten Ton Shadow’).

Early Manorexia had more Thirlwell-adjacent shape as sort of the horror arm of his cinematic compositions; ten years in, Dinoflagellate is more finely carved out as its own sound, living in a world of atmospherics that can slip and slide, as needed, into Thirlwell’s prancing beats – though even these are almost wholly restrained this time out. It’s a very purposeful album, song by song and as a whole, more than justifying the inclusion of a 5.1 stereo surround sound DVD for sinking into the listen’s details.

…But that depth can also be a slight barrier: the 10-minute stretch of ‘Krzystl’ is, on one hand, a brilliant blending / bending of sound into song, using crackles and buzzes to give ambience shape. On the other hand, it’s an indulgence: elsewhere, the aforementioned ‘Island’ gives us similar minimalism that fits a bit more seamlessly into the album experience, and is paralleled by the masterful ‘Kinaesthesia,’ the penultimate track that hovers, ominously over building “strings” and forces, if possible, the title’s condition upon us: shifting from black, to blue, to crimson, before closer ‘Struck’ picks this up and makes the horror movie vibe real once more, with percussion clanking during the “film’s” climax. Back at ‘Krzystl,’ though, as fascinating as its sounds are, it doesn’t quite fit in with its surroundings or (sorry) isn’t quite needed to complete the album’s experience. I did mention the album’s purposefulness, though, and I think that’s found in the way the music here can’t be said to be organic or digital or, stylewise, if it is purely cinematic, or atmospheric; ‘Krzystl’s reliance on what sounds like random noise to achieve that is noteworthy, it just feels like a project that could exist on its own.

That aside, Blooms is pretty much unmatched in its approach, coming across as almost casual – songs creep in – but so affecting as well, alongside the otherworldliness of its instrumentation (that, again, otherwise sounds “normal,” though you can’t quite pinpoint what you’re hearing). It may bump into being an art project at points, though thankfully it’s an incredibly compelling one, and mostly blurs the line between 5.1 surround sound experiment and a living, breathing soundscape.