026.5 - The Deep Dive - Cryosauna - Grid Failure - Notes and Interview

 

 

Notes

Black Ice - Man where do you even start with this album?  The first time I heard it I had to stop it because I knew I wasn’t appreciating it for what it was, I was expecting 2-step and what I got was nothing like it.  Everything that Cryo has done to this point has been some variation of upbeat tempos or ambient, nothing ever this dark or this slow… it took me quite a bit of time to just disconnect from what I thought Cryosauna was and recalibrate to what Cryosauna is.
And what he is on this release is the next step in his evolution.  What he has done here is take his style and warp it into something so dark and twisted that it is a grotesque reflection of what it used to be; in the very best way possible.  
Black Ice starts off the album in a very similar way that a dark ambient album would start out: brooding.  And this brooding feeling really never leaves throughout the rest of the album, it just hangs over your head and crushes you with its oppressive weight.  The tones used here are slow, deliberate, and distorted.  The reverb used on the hand clap alone is enough to make you feel like you're in an abandoned warehouse or a huge opening in a cave.  It feels monstrous, like something is stalking you.
Pulling back to the start of the song, there is a distant clanking of machinery and an inhuman eerie tone that draws the album in.  I remember thinking that this was an odd start to a Cryo album the first time I heard it.  Once that bass drum, tone, rumble thing comes in through holy mother of god it throws you for a loop.  It's a huuuuuuge tone that just dominates everything at 23 second in.  If you didn’t know something was very different before, you sure as hell do now.
From there the song starts its glacier like pace as it slowly crushes you below its oppressive atmosphere.  Like this thing is funeral doom pace, 60 bpm, MAX.  
This largely continues until 1:18 when that eerie tone returns, but this time its front and center.  Its not the exact same thing but, its just as inhuman as it was before.  It slowly decays as it goes over the measure, it takes like 5-8 seconds for this to complete, but that's a whole measure, its just insane, and I love it.  
Right at 2:22 the initial beat returns with some additional voice effects of people talking in the background and ambience.  This whole thing is just eerie man, I can’t say I’ve ever heard anything exactly like this before.  I’ve heard equivalent stuff in metal: funeral doom.  Insanely slow, and it just crushes you with the magnitude of its weight.  
The song will revisit its individual components and combine them all together by the time it is over, and then it fades out into silence… just like it started.  This song serves as an excellent opener, almost more so than any other song on the album could have.  It draws the listener in and introduces the core concepts of the album very well.  The future songs will take these initial concepts and bend and sometimes break them into unrecognizable sonic structures.  Perfect way for Cryo to plant a new flag in the ground and announce that he is not bound to any single genre, but in fact is capable of many surprises.  I just can’t say enough about how much I love this evolution… elivates Cryo from an excellent artist into the realm of the elite.  

Pale Skin - Immediately we find out that Black Ice is not a fluke, this is the new sound of Grid Failure, this is a huge huge change in style but a very very welcomed one.  I always get excited when an artist take a chance like this, this music is totally inaccessible, totally alien and totally amazing.  It takes several listens to even begin to wrap your head around it, and those are the very best albums.  In this case the short run time for the album really helps elevate it rather than being detrimental.  Its leaving me with the feeling of wanting more, much more so than feeling like the album runs on too long.
But back to Pale Skin.  This is the first fold in the formula that was put forward by Black Ice.  The huge echo and minimalistic melodies are still there, but this one is even more stripped back.  Where Black Ice has that middle section where things “get going” this one remains largely ambient with minimalist percussion and only scattered sound effects.  
I think that the placement here is perfect.  If this was the first song, it might make more people give up on the album.  But since we have Black Ice leading us into the album and it does have some more typical elements to songs - there is a melody, there is a section where the whole thing blows up… acting the role of a drop - we know now that this is a very different album and we can start to see what Cryo has in store with each of his new songs.  
Like I said, Pale Skin really strips everything back, and it's a really to the songs strength.  The sound design here is incredible.  Each effect and track has a massive feel to it and the way that the song is structured each instrumental has its own time to shine and breathe.  The snare has a wicked reverb/echo on it that just lasts forever and if it was a very active song it would lose the intensity that comes with the minimalistic structure.  This song broods and just waits and waits… you anticipate the next effect/percussion/instrument.  Great great one two punch to start off the album.

Shivering - Holy bejesus the tone that starts this off is massive.  I mean this whole thing is like that, massive and slow.  A slow moving glacier that is just crushing anything in front of it.  I know I’ve said that a lot, but each track really hammers home this overarching concept.
There are a few new elements to the sound on here.  We get a little glimpse of the male vocals that were used so prominently in Reckless and many of the earlier works that defined Cryo’s sound to this point.
The song does an excellent job of having those massive pregnant pauses between things happening, it lets things decay… I really can't even really say echo or reverberate, no this just decays into nothingness… silence.  
Short, but in that short amount of time we’ve seen a new element put into the fold, and it draws us further into the album.  At this point I’m eagerly awaiting the next tracks to see where this sound evolves to.  

Bitter Winds - White noise and ambience… not what I was expecting from what was going on in the first three tracks.  The whole thing sounds like it's phasing from side to side and pulling me into some type of whirlwind.  And this is just the first 20 seconds.
After hinting that something massive is coming with background sounds that stalk in the noise, at 27 seconds a huge tone begins to swell and takes over the primary focus of the song.  It slowly fades from side to side like the noise and has some sort of note progression, though you could hardly call this melodic.  Right around 1 minute we get some honest to goodness percussion, at a slow pace but not at the sub 60 bpm that we’ve seen to this point, this is actually a rhythm rather than just single hits on a snare or a bass drum.  
Now here comes the biggest surprise of the album so far for me, an actual melody.  The voice that was hinted at in Shivering comes front and center and compliments the low tones and adds a near etherial feel to the song. This is a huge huge addition to the song and the album.  In albums where mood and ambience are the focus, little bits of melody like this stand out in a striking way.  I love that its been 4 tracks in before there really is any hint of melody in any of these songs.  The 20-30 seconds that have the melody in them shine brightly as a contrast to all the darkness and despair that is everywhere else in the album.  Well done.
As with all things the melody has to come to an end too, and with it the song goes back to a hugely oppressive atmosphere.  Massive pulses drive us further and further away from the bit of hope that we saw through the melody.
This whole song is extremely well crafted, one of the best on the album.

Frostbite - Wow where did this song come from? This is pure ambience but not in a dark sense at all, this is synth pads and digital effects that come across with a huge sense of warmth rather than dread or despair.  The main synth pad has a quiet major key wall of sound to it, and surrounding it are little bits and pieces of digital distortions, like we are hovering in cyberspace.  The song doesn't really go anywhere besides that, but it's short enough that it doesn't need to.  Another fold into this increasingly complex album.

Enveloping Dark - This song may very well be the strangest on the album.  THe rhythm is all over the place, the instrumentation have a distortion to them that is unlike anything I’ve heard on the album to this point.  There is this metal on metal feel to everything but its not quite right, everything feels like its almost normal but something has happened to it, distorted, twisted, bent it to an unnatural state.
This track is co-written by an artist named LKF. I don’t know who this is, but they obviously had a huge influence on the sound as this track sticks out massively from the remaining tracks.  Be it the strange percussion at the start of the song or the absolutely bizarre vocals that dominate the middle of the song.  Looking up LKF on several resources didn’t show any hits either, truly a mystery.  
The placement of the song here is also very interesting.  We just had little bits of melody and warmth for the first time in the entire album, and now we are ripped back into darkness with this track.  While we are back in the purely mechanical realm of the album, this feels totally different than a track like Black Ice.  This feels much more… artificial? Distorted? Inhuman? I don’t know, but I really like the effect it has on the flow of the album, even if I don’t enjoy all the parts of the song.  Definitely a case of the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

Overcoat Blue - Something akin to a siren starts the track off, fading in slowly and then dominating the forefront of the song.  Some subtle high hats come in to compliment, but this is truly dominated by this siren tone.  Some other notes are played in the background one at a time, and eventually they take over, and they meander for a bit before.  All this ends up acting as an introduction into the main part of the song.
Right at 1:18 holy mother of god this thing explodes.  Anything that I said was massive before is a lie.  This whole song just became a massive monolithe of destruction. I can’t say this enough, this song absolutely crushes.  Its slow but its at a fast pace for the album, think like funeral doom drums.  BUt man that tone just crushes everything, and that snare, I’m in love.  Favorite song on the album by a long shot… this thing just slays.  
The snare and the bass drum both have this massive echo effect on them… this is beyond reverb, the decay period is almost 3 seconds.  That plus a very simple and dark melody just drives this whole thing to the next level.  Forget anything about hope, this is the terminator coming to end your life.  You have violated a fundamental law of this dystopian society and the punishment is death… there is no escape.  Just top level stuff.

Near Zero Kelvin - Man how do you follow up a song as massive as Overcoat Blue? Well one way would be to do something completely different and that is the direction Cryo chose to go here.  If anything this harkens back to the opener Black Ice.  There is minimal ambience alongside a massive drum beat, though this is significantly faster (maybe 80-90 bpm?) than the opener.
The song slowly builds its layers and right around 1:30 it adds in a mechanical static that acts as the main driver of the song, it adds a layer of depth to the darkness.  There is a lot going on in the background here if you give yourself time to listen, mechanical sounds of all varieties as well as haunting sounds that echo in and out.  The effect that this has is really chilling (haha get it?), but honestly with a song title like Near Zero Kelvin I would have thought that the song would be like 1 bpm haha.
All that said the song revisits the initial formula of the album very well though with a slight twist of doing it much faster.  Excellent song and a suited follow up to Overcoat Blue.

Grid Failure - The title track being the last song on the album is one of my favorite tropes in all of music, and Cryo does not disappoint here.  This song is something else, it strips everything back to near nothingness and gives us noise, static and an extremely sparse beat to drive the album home.  There is no melody here, only a soundscape.  Any chance we thought that we would have to return to the brief warmth of bitter winds and frostbite are just dashes here.  
This is likely the most inhuman sounding song on the album, there is just a mess of different noises and soundscapes and a beat that follows its own rhythm with no regard for anything else in the song.  The machines have taken over and this is what we are left with, humanity has failed.  
This is a great great closer to the album, it really drives home all the different aspects that have been touched on throughout the album sans the melody.  Many albums lack a solid closing track, this is not one of them.  

Overall - I never thought Cryo would have such a huge sound change, let alone such a good one.  This album is easily one of my top ten of the year… likely number 2 or three.  The sound that Cryo has gotten here is just massive, immense, crushing, anything else you can use to describe a monolithe of sound that is totally inhuman.  There are small smatterings of melody here and there and there is a tiny tiny bit of Cryo’s trademark vocals on Bitter Winds but on the whole this thing is its own beast.  It came out of nowhere and it just slays.  Just fucking slays.

 

 
Interview

You’ve described this album as tower step.  For those who aren’t familiar can you go over the history of the genre and any relevant releases?
Towerstep was initially started by the owner of Dream Catalogue, HKE. It was described by the man himself as ‘really slow trap’.

Tower step has been explored a little by other artists in the past (HKE, Jude etc.) but never for a full album (to my knowledge).  Why do an entire album in this style?

Initially, I had made one song that was going to be on this ‘Towerstep’ compilation album, a whole bunch of people making songs that sounded like their own interpretation, of what they thought ‘Towerstep’ sounded like. While I thought that a compilation would be cool, nobody had made a ‘towerstep’ album before, and I thought ‘why not make an album?’

You have a guest artist on Enveloping Dark and it shows. The song has this dark, twisted and inhumane sound to it that contrasts very well with the rest of the album.   I can’t find any information on LKF on any platform.  If you feel so inclined, who is LKF and how did you come to work with them?  How did they influence the song writing on Enveloping Dark?

I have no idea who they are. They sent me an email with a bunch of stems of weird buddhist sounding music; gamelans and prayer samples. They wanted me to make a song out of those stems, and who am I to say no? Their sound, atmosphere and mood perfectly fit the project I was making.

Multi part question: Your sound design on Grid Failure is just massive, you go well beyond just standard reverb - I think I counted a 2 and a half second decay on Overcoat Blues on the snare.
Did your production style change at all on Grid Failure compared to some of your earlier albums? If so, how?
Did your actual song writing process change?

Given that the album’s songs are all incredibly slow-paced, the real challenge was making loops that would not get boring. 20-40 bpm. It was very difficult trying to make a song that doesn’t become a drag at a tempo that slow. Definitely shook up my songwriting skills.

This album is a huge change in style.  Do you see yourself exploring this genre further in the future?  Do you think you’ll go back to the garage/2-step style of your past works?  Basically where do you see your music evolving to?

This was a fun experiment, but I’m not sure if I could continue making this style. It’s a bit too drastic for my tastes, and the next CRYOSAUNA projects will probably revert back to the ‘Aurasearch/Restless’ style.

On Bitter Winds I hear a few seconds of the male voice that was so prominent in Restless.  Was this a throwback to that album?  Its really the only spot on the album where the vintage Cryo sound comes through.

Yeah, you could say that! It really does sound like a flashback to my previous work. Never thought of it that way, interesting!

Bitter Winds and Frostbite show just a little bit of warmth, or something other than the dark oppressive atmosphere of the rest of the album.  What were you trying to get across to the listener here?  It stands out in a dramatic way due to the nature of the rest of the album.

I wanted a slight break from the unrelenting darkness that the rest of the tracks put forward, as an album of constant, lurching, depressive beats might have gotten stale.

Is there a narrative to this album? It almost has a man vs. machine type feel to it, with the machines ultimately winning at the end.

There actually is. I came up with this scenario about your typical ‘dreampunk’ city being hit with a power outage. All those bright neon lights just all of a sudden being shut off. Replaced with the muted yellow or orange dim glow of emergency lights. A skeleton of what once was a thriving urban metropolis. I thought it sounded really cool, and different too. A different perspective.

I’ve been asking artists to write the forward for my reviews of late.  If you are comfortable, could you give a one paragraph summary of what grid failure means to you and what you hope people will get out of your album?

I hope this album represents another side to Dreampunk. It doesn’t have to be just pretty bright lights and phaser soft-synths. It has the ability to be soul-crushingly dark as well.

Have you ever heard the metal genre funeral doom? It bears a strong resemblance to the style you have here, just executed with guitars, bass, and drums.

I actually really like Boris. I never had ‘doom metal’ in mind when making the album, but that’s an interesting comparison!

What equipment did you use creating this album?

I used a lot of iZotope’s ‘Trash 2’ on this record. There’s this ‘convolution’ section in it, where you can make whatever signal you’ve fed through it, sound like it’s coming out of an amp, or a tinny speaker or whatever. It really helped pushed forward that dystopian, black, depressive sound.