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In "Dark Clouds," featuring Frank Zozky, the French sound artist and photographer Bastien Pons assembles one of his most immersive sculptures yet, less a song than an atmosphere into which you fall.
"Dark Clouds" becomes underway in the black within seconds of its first track, sacrificing melody for mood. A mantra-like voice hums at the center, churning with insistence as broken loops and industrial low textures circle around it. The effect is both peculiarly claustrophobic and tranquil, resembling a journey through a fog of emotion. It’s not a boom that the sound emits, it’s the pressurization of air. Pons and Zozky build not with volume but with density, each layer of static and hiss dissolving into the next until time ceases to matter.
"Dark Clouds" drops the listener in a state of suspension that refuses to relent, drawing the listener into a heavy, hushed storm time and time again that never quite breaks. Pulling from his background in musique concrète under Bernard Fort, Pons treats sound the way a sculptor treats material, molding contrast, grain, and silence into something tangible. Influences such as Lustmord, Swans, and Coil can be heard murmuring distantly in the fog, but Pons’ language is distinctly and uncannily his own, texturally and profoundly introspective.
On "Dark Clouds," a record whose ghostly vocals come from Frank Zosky, Betien Pons pushes his pursuit of ambient minimalism and industrial, trying to abstract a touching, warping offer to stay in the commodious material of tension.