What does subtlety mean to you? I imagine someone artfully steering a difficult conversation toward their preferred resolution without the other party realizing it. Or perhaps the way an Impressionist’s lily resolves into form out of what initially seems a blur of colorful noise. You might envision opening the lid of a stoneware tagine to reveal the long-simmered stew, and as the steam mushrooms up out of its enclosure, your nose detects the slightest hint – barely a kiss – of golden-threaded saffron. On the evidence of Black Noise, his latest album as Bong-Ra, Jason Köhnen’s idea of subtlety might be something like shitting in your hat while staring you dead in the eyes.
Köhnen may not exactly be a household name for most of the metal-inquisitive public, but the Dutch artist has been a fascinating musical shapeshifter for more than three decades. He was a founding member (first on drums and later bass) of the atmospheric doom band Celestial Season (whose Solar Lovers is an overlooked gem in the vein of early My Dying Bride and The Gathering) but has since moved on to a wide range of electronic and other experimental projects. Bong-Ra is the most notable and longest-running of these projects, but fans of sparse, noir-ish atmosphere along the lines of Bohren und Der Club of Gore or Ulver’s Perdition City should investigate Köhnen’s work in the sister projects of the Mount Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble and the Mt. Fuji Doomjazz Corporation.
Köhnen’s output as Bong-Ra has centered primarily on breakcore, which itself is a hybridized mongrel with bits of jungle, gabber, industrial, rave, hardcore techno, hip-hop, reggae, IDM, and more. In recent years, however, he has morphed Bong-Ra into a crushing, ritualistic experimental doom act (on 2018’s Antediluvian and 2022’s Meditations), with some similarities to acts like Om, Sunn O))), or Colin Stetson. Black Noise, Bong-Ra’s first album for Debemur Morti, is yet another shift, this time into – as hinted above – gleefully un-subtle industrial metal.
What all of this means is that Black Noise is perfect for degenerate fans of Godflesh, Mick Harris’s Scorn, Author & Punisher, Frontline Assembly (especially circa Millennium), and Thee Maldoror Kollective’s New Era Viral Order. Album opener “Dystopic” sounds a bit like something cribbed from Streetcleaner, but sped up just enough to land in the darkest German goth club of your fevered mid-90s imagination. “Death#2” is particularly effective with its sparse, slow-motion breakbeat and funky distorted bass, and “Black Rainbow,” especially in its closing minutes, sets its vocal cadence at odds with the mechanistic pummeling in a way that is productively unsettling. “Ruins” might be the best tune of the bunch, given the unexpectedly beautiful and mournful doom-inflected groove that it finds in its back half. It feels a little like those early days with Celestial Season (for whom Köhnen has continued to drum since their 2011 reunion) filtering through all the eras of Bong-Ra’s metamorphosis.
Black Noise is not an album to put on when you need to be uplifted. It is primarily slow, malicious, monolithic, brutish, and ugly in a self-consciously demonstrative way. It is also immensely satisfying and well-crafted. Even when Köhnen’s breakcore drum programming or hip-hop techno rhythms take center stage, those half-time drums never quite manage to derail the pointedly glum hammering of the rest of the song (like on album closer “Blissful Ignorance,” which feels almost like a seasick shoegaze song trying to emerge from a suffocating cocoon of industrial dub and doom). The state of the world right now, if we’re being honest, feels more often than not like somebody has taken a shit directly in our hats. Black Noise is a fitting soundtrack to staring that world dead in the eyes, waiting to see who blinks first.
