4 out of 5

Label: Full of Nothing (digital)

Produced by: Zurkas Tepla

Amazing, brutal soundscapes from Zurkas Tepla, blending digitally-tweaked ambience with beats, crafting a perpetual “offness” that makes the quiet and loud moments equally unsettling.

Templar’s compositions are fascinating: there’s certainly a looseness to them, but they seethe and surge in a very controlled fashion, finding a middleground between improv and written works, often experienced track by track (something open-ended bleeding into something tight and articulate), but sometimes this occurs intra-track as well. The latter experience, though expansive, is where the album can drift a bit too far: towards the end of Permanent Research, it feels like the ambient storytelling starts to fizzle, like a long, slow fade to black. While this fits an overall structure that piles tenser, more abrasive material into the album’s middle, the ending of the album nonetheless lags behind the opener in terms of immersiveness.

Some of this may just take some “work” from the listener, though, as the cryptic song titles are not necessarily suggested of mood, as the imagery they conjure feels subjective. But I like this as a wayward form of storytelling: by blending intense digital noise manipualtion with found-soundish elements and a wash of background noise, Zurkas already establishes a hard-to-pin down aural template. Going in with expectations that are met and then dashed as songs twist and turn just adds to the mystique.

Dense stuff.