(written by Islander)
SSMMÜTT (please pay careful attention to the umlaut as you sound out the name) is the experimental musical project of Irish producer and illustrator Robert Mirolo, accompanied by a changing cast of supporting characters.
The music has rightly been called “shape-shifting”, further described by the label that’s releasing their new album (Cursed Monk Records) as “a visceral alchemy of Doom, Kosmische, and Ambient textures, often collapsing into the crushing weight of blackened sludge” — and that’s not an exhaustive description.
The name of the album, which will be released on October 30th, is A Blight on the Perfect Organism of Death. We are premiering a full stream of it today, all nine songs and 31 minutes of it, preceded by a likely futile attempt to prepare you for the often vicious, often captivating, and constantly surprising carnival that’s now arrived in your neighborhood.
We are told by Cursed Monk that SSMMÜTT “is defined by a rare adaptability, appearing equally at home performing for a DIY punk collective beneath a bridge in Kaunas, Lithuania, as they are on the prestigious stage of Dublin’s National Concert Hall.” Listening to this new album, it’s possible to imagine that both kinds of audiences would have been left… uncomfortable… but fascinated.
You might calculate from the album’s length and the number of its tracks that the songs aren’t long ones, and in fact three of them don’t reach the two-minute mark. But the longest one (nearly five minutes) is the one that opens the album — “Under Eight Heels“.
This one will likely appeal to the usual denizens of our site. It heaves forward like an enormous mangy beast, groaning out sludgy, grit-slathered riffing as the rhythm section stomps with the weight of granite and inflicts clobbering outbursts. It creates a nasty kind of trance, and a head-moving one at that, but this song is also your first indication of the musical shape-shifting referenced above.
Suddenly the beast vanishes, and in its place you’ll hear a slowly twanging melody backed by a big grumbling bass, a melody that creates a sinister and swampy aura. And then just as suddenly the beast reappears, and this time shattering screams and shrill, quivering tones accompany its more urgently pounding and viciously slashing progress. The music sounds simultaneously brutish and apparitional, both destructively ugly and vanishingly ethereal.
And the shapes continue to shift, as that first track flows seamlessly into the next one, the relatively brief “Arachne_Domina“, which delivers a whine of abrasive feedback, droning tones that warble, bursts of sizzling sonic acid, and crazed howls.
Onward the flow will carry you, through the throbbing, channel-shifting strangeness that begins “An Dullahan” and the hard-rocking grooves and nervously writhing guitar abrasion that follows. This one will make you want to compulsively bounce, even as it feels like it’s eating away your flesh.
Feverishly screaming and woozily blaring tones lift the song higher, and other abrasively quavering, sharply pulsating, and seductively slithering sounds feel like the presence of sonic psychoactive substances. No wonder “An Dullahan” was chosen as a “single”, because it’s the most primally infectious and head-hooking song on the album.
We probably should have mentioned at the outset that there are (almost) no pronounced breaks between the nine tracks. The album was designed to pull you in and then carry you along for the whole ride without pause. And that is absolutely how it should be heard.
And so the ride goes forward, through the skin-shivering, nerve-jangling electronics encompassed by “The Bottom Of A Well” (which might make you imagine a swarm of insects eagerly feeding on you), the dreamlike and melancholy acoustic melody of “There’s No Longer Anything Here For You” (and its surrounding collage of odd ambient sounds, like someone’s packing up your things), and the head-nodding beats, shimmering melodiousness, and twanging psychedelia of “Natkinys Drugys” (a song which also features vibrations of ghostly singing and ambient frostings of cosmic mystery).
In the final trio the caravan carries us through “Crush the Sun With Sacred Teeth“, in which subdued drones begin, strange whispers and throbbing pulses end, and improvisational-sounding instrumental and electronic escapades occupy the unsettling middle. Those throbbing pulses, in turn, push us into “Every Part Replaced“, another song that might make you want to bounce and dance, possibly even more so than “An Dullahan“, though it’s a fuzzy and trippy experience too.
And at the very last you’ll encounter “Trapped Beneath My Dead Horse“, which is well-named. This is the one place where things don’t seamlessly flow into it from the preceding track. Instead, the volume suddenly escalates, and so does the ruinous nature of the electronic assault.
From there we circle back around to territory similar to how the album began, climbing back aboard an enormous shaggy beast, right next to cauterizing screams but with the sharp pop of a snare to keep us from pitching off. As the beast halts, celestial wonders open up above us, and then shakers tell us it’s time to jump around a primitive bonfire. The narcotics for the ritual take hold at the end.
And now, here’s all the music, an album that both discomfited and thoroughly fascinated this writer. Not for everyone, of course (but what is?) but well worth exploring for the adventure-minded among you.
As noted above, A Blight On The Perfect Organism of Death will be released by Cursed Monk Records on October 30th, and it’s available for order on CD and digital formats (see the link below). Here are the people responsible for it:
Robert Mirolo – Guitars, arrangements, synths, programming, mixing, mastering, design/layout, whatever, etc
Leonard Traynor – Bass on tracks 1, 2, 3, 6,
Kev Sheridan – Drums on tracks 1,2,3,6,7
Gabrielė Šadzevičiūtė – Vocals on track 6
Fabien De Menou At Monoton Studios Berlin- Recording/mixing drums, bass and guitars on tracks 1,2,3,6,7
Eylül Deniz – Lyra/ambience on track 7
Charlie Cryer – Vocals on tracks 1, 9.
P.S. It appears from our social media perusals that this will be SSMMÜTT’s last album for some indefinite period of time (and maybe forever), a send-off created by Robert Mirolo intended to capture most of the sounds that SSMMÜTT has represented over the last decade.
PRE-ORDER:
https://cursedmonk.bandcamp.com/album/a-blight-on-the-perfect-organism-of-death
SSMMÜT:
https://linktr.ee/ssmmutt
https://www.instagram.com/ssmmutt_/