Stagnant Waters – Rifts Review

If you have found yourself thinking lately, “Boy, I sure am glad that the world around me makes so much sense, and I’m really enjoying the sensation of thinking clearly,” you might want to talk to your doctor before experimenting with Stagnant Waters. For everyone else, the Franco-Norwegian trio’s new album, Rifts, explodes with such synapse-liquefying sonic chaos that it makes the last few Dødheimsgard albums sound like the Ramones by comparison. Rifts is the result of three musicians – Svein Egil Hatlevik of Fleurety / formerly of Dødheimsgard and Zweizz, Camille Giraudeau of Void and Dreams of the Drowned, and Aymeric Thomas of Pryaprisme – who apparently were never taught not to run with scissors.

When I reviewed Stagnant Waters’s self-titled debut album back in 2012, I wrote that “attempting to accurately describe the music of Stagnant Waters is always going to be a hopelessly poor substitute for simply listening to Stagnant Waters and letting its carefully apportioned chaos seep into your every pore.” This is still true. Although the band’s roots are in black metal, their compositions jitter stylistically between industrial, black metal, math rock, avant-garde rock, contemporary classical, and experimental electronic. More so than any particular musical formula, though, what primarily defines Stagnant Waters is a madcap, anarchic ethos. Yes, the attentive and well-moisturized listener will find much in common with Dødheimsgard, Axis of Perdition, and Dodecahedron, but any visitor to the peculiar landscape of Rifts will likely find themselves sketching a personal map of the terrain. Here is mine:

The comparison that makes the most sense is not actually a musical one. One of the best aspects of the British sketch comedy show Monty Python’s Flying Circus was the troupe’s willingness to work an idea or a premise only for as long as it was funny, and then to discard it and move on abruptly. Have you got a beautifully absurd setup and a couple excellent payoff laughs but no idea how to end a sketch? No problem! Just hit the audience with an “And now, for something completely different.” Stagnant Waters works in much the same way, in that the sounds they smash together seem to be limited only by their imaginations and their creative impatience. Got a killer riff but you only want to play it a couple times before moving on to some smoky lounge drumming? That’s okay! Have you tried writing “normal” lyrics but instead got hung up on some Dadaistic nonsense like “Poh-tay-toh, poh-tah-toh / Toh-may-toh, toh-mah-toh / Geronimo / Hate to say I told you so”? The world is your oyster. Unsure whether you’re playing a normal person’s idea of weird music, or a weird person’s idea of normal music? Say “yes, and” to life, friend.

In another move sure to thrill and confound listeners in equal measure, Rifts is presented as two separate versions of itself. Find the digital version of the album, for example, and you will see fourteen songs, but as two sets of the same seven songs. This is not a simple matter of one being the “real” album and the other being strictly alternates or some kind of remix album, because although each pairing is still (mostly) identifiable as the same core composition, the versions are often radically different in length, in mood, in instrumentation. Each of the seven song titles on the first “album” include “(C)” and each on the second “album” include “(A),” which I hypothesize indicates that Camille Giraudeau handled the arrangements or production of the first album, and Aymeric Thomas did the same for the second. This imperfect repetition gives the listener the unexpectedly cozy and pleasant sensation of trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle with no fixed image.

“Rifts (C)” opens with a heaving black metal riff and industrial-tinged drums and a fairly straightforward song structure, but the tones are all just a little off of center – the vocals are processed, but only slightly; Giraudeau plays some weird effects on the bass, but the guitar also occasionally sounds like a robotic mosquito. The extraneous instrumentation is kept to a relative minimum, but there are a few places where the wooden thump of a marimba or some other mallet-struck instrument comes through. The midsection then weaves in some effectively queasy guitar bends, a little bit like The Work Which Transforms Gosh, I Hope I Didn’t Leave the Sink Running. Elsewhere on the “(C)” side, “Split and Spilt (C )” starts with wildly tumbling percussion, the live drums and programmed drums flitting across one another, and it soon turns into some of the most furiously scything, divebombing black metal riffing of the album. In the background, though, undefinable instruments (strings? synths? piano?) pick out a complementary rhythm, which gives the piece the feeling of some kind of alien minuet. There’s a brief respite after the huge downbeat just past the 4-minute mark, but it’s fleeting. Stagnant Waters excels at this throughout the album, spooling out just enough thread for the listener to get their bearings, and then yanking it back in favor of something totally different.

On the “(A)” side, “Gonad Waltz” steps out with strings and piano, but then sidesteps into crashing and blasting while those strings and piano hammer out a funky undercurrent of a melody. About two minutes in, a wild punky drum fill sets the mood for a particularly frantic stretch, but even so, the balance is even between the metallic intensity of the drums and the backing classical elements. At the 3:15 mark, we get a taste of operatic vocals while Giraudeau’s guitars swerve into sharper focus over relentless programmed breakbeats. Four and a half minutes in, Thomas’s clarinet and tough, chopping funk drums frame Zweizz’s spoken-word musings, while at the 6-minute mark the drums sustain a heady attack that sounds straight out of Monumental Possession. Starting around 7:20, Thomas introduces a flute break that hits a hard reset on the song, transitioning it into a kind of tribal, psychedelic jam session – maybe a little bit like the Boredoms interpreting Bjork’s Utopia. The blasting rejoins around 10:30, but it keeps that same hypnotic energy going. In general, the “(A)” side of the album pulls back on some of the more guitar-forward energy of the “(C)” side, but it is no less frenetic for shifting up the balance. Each song is just as likely to feature skittering drums and splenetic vocals as it is clarinet, flute, accordion, hammered dulcimer, and so on.

In mathematics, fractal geometry is the study of a type of pattern that repeats almost infinitely, and which looks essentially the same at any degree of magnification. (It is self-similar, which means it repeats an infinite function on increasingly fractional segments of itself.) Imagine a crystalline shape with jutting triangular nodules that you can see with the naked eye, but when you put it beneath a microscope and zoom in 10 times, 100 times, 1000 times, the pattern looks exactly the same. 

Listening to Stagnant Waters produces that same vertiginous sense of unreality. For as much as you can focus, moment to moment, on how each song spills over its own boundaries, the more that you dive in and try to map this version of a song to its ghostly twin on the other side, or to follow the spiraling thought patterns that might have led to such aggressively odd sounds, the more the fractal nature of the album blurs your vision. It is the same in every moment precisely because it is never the same in any moment. However, for all its weirdness and shapeshifting and intentionally confrontational sounds, Rifts is a welcoming album. It’s an album that seems to know that it asks many more questions than it answers. It is a brilliant, inspired, unsettled album that invites you to listen to it forwards, backwards, one song pair at a time, with friends, lovers, enemies, strangers. Listen to Rifts and bathe in the warmth of its permanent unfinishing.