Review: Sult – Always I Gnaw

The album closes on a piece titled "The Freedom Of Others Extends Mine To Infinity", which is a quote from Russian revolutionary anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. Freedom here is not depicted as tranquility and relief, but as persistent strain and improvisatory vigilance: bowed surfaces screaming, guitar strings scraped to produce strangled rasps, contrabass like a titanium block being dragged along a metal floor. One imagines the trio with their limbs deliberately cocked and wrenched out of shape, attacking the instruments with the soles of feet and the backs of teeth, in the knowledge that unorthodox sounds require unorthodox approaches. The message? Freedom isn't a state, but a process; a tireless fight to retain what has been won, fending off the encroachment of nefarious forces and the dilution of one's own emancipatory resolve. Sult's music is an incessant, guttural renewal of liberation, holding the players on the radical edge, resisting the gravity of consensus and compromise.

High volume isn't always necessary. Opener "It Sifts" slumps into overtone whimpers and Håvard Skaset's guitar on rapid open strum. Guro Skumsnes Moe's contrabass emulates a saloon door hinge, singing idly as it swings, while percussionist Jacob Felix Heule scrapes and rattles as if frantically searching, too fixated to notice when the other two stop playing. The air is just as charged at moments of quiet as during the clamorous peaks, perhaps even more so; one can hear the players not playing, strumming and bowing the air above the strings, until finally sound returns in peals and squeals and splinters and wheezes. The materials – wood and metal most prominently – are forever brought to the brink of snapping, bent and stretched until they won't, in search of those sounds only attainable on the brink. Perhaps the most immediate manifestation of this are the throat-splitting howls that occasionally protrude out of the din. Pain or ecstasy? Both?