Welcome to the bespoke machine apocalypse.
If Tristan Shone’s music as Author & Punisher has been on your radar at all, you likely know that the sounds of Melk en Honing are formed by custom machines that Shone has designed and built. While his instruments are not truly machines by some classical definitions – i.e., a device created to ease an otherwise arduous task – neither are they simply objets d’art. Instead, his machines pose an interesting question: why build these functional objects if one can accomplish much the same barrage of sounds from the comfort and safety of a laptop? Or, to put it even more bluntly: why put all this sweat into being Godflesh if you can be Godflesh with some stylized synth patches and a drum machine?
That’s a reductive take on Author & Punisher, of course, but it’s worth asking: does it get you anything else, as a listener, to know the physicality involved in making these sounds? Then again, that line of questioning is perilously close to demanding a quantification of the marginal utility of artistic expression itself; some doors are better left unopened.
Academic nonsense aside, Melk en Honing is not a particularly immediate album. Opening track “The Barge” takes far too long to build, and then provides insufficient payoff. Still, although it takes a while to hit its stride, when the album does find its tongue and groove, the results are often masterful. In particular, the tandem of “Shame” and “Future Man” is probably the best 15 minutes of music Shone has thus far rendered from his scraps of wire and steel. “Future Man” is a masterpiece of a track, with its pained, melodic vocals (think Odd Fellows Rest-era Crowbar) cresting atop disintegrating waves of beats.
Throughout Melk en Honing, A&P is more interested in corrupting the rhythms of dance than in hammering heavy metal to an industrial anvil. Crucial late-album track “Teething,” for example, is reminiscent of Nine Inch Nails‘s cover of “Physical (You’re So),” with its gear-fed lust. In general, A&P’s percussion provides ample evidence that Shone’s background is more concentrated in electronic and industrial music than in metal – you can hear elements of dubstep, gabber, and other heavily distorted forms of electronic music throughout.
The biggest change from A&P’s previous work is the increased reliance on clean-sung vocals, which feature prominently on “Shame,” “Future Man,” and “Void, Null, Alive.” The easy way to interpret the change would be to say that the melodic vocals offer a compelling contrast to the thrum and crush of heavy industry, thus inviting the listener to contemplate human fragility in an increasingly mechanized, automated world.
But listen closer: Is that the whole story? Maybe these disquietingly sweet, shimmering passages aren’t the beauty to the machinery’s beast; maybe they’re the lure at the end of the anglerfish’s mouth. In any case, when the final, post-corrosive calm of “Void, Null, Alive” patters out, it feels a little like emerging from a chrysalis of aluminum and ash. “Sun beats down on the brow / Palm trees bear it somehow” – sweltering imagery that matches the claustrophobic intensity of Author & Punisher at its merciless best. Melk en Honing doesn’t hit those highs consistently, but the greatness of its grind and clatter outweighs its fallow, plodding moments.
That’s what these machines get you: the sense that each clanging downbeat is the result of physical striving, aspiring, overcoming. The sweat transmutes suffering into something approaching purity, even if asymptotically.
