Petridisch — ‘358’
(I originally wrote this back in September of 2017. In honor of the debut of its 2021 Remaster, here’s my original review published for the first time ever.)
The ’90s were a strange time. Computers were in their pubescent teenage years and VHS tapes still dominated the landscape of the visual narrative, even though film was still the format of choice for the cinema. But the ability for no-budget amateur filmmakers to put their dreams and/or nightmares onto something as relatively accessible as VHS catalyzed an explosion of home movies of absolutely every variety. The way that VHS tapes and VCRs colored the visuals of these images is still obsessed over to this day; the horror film anthology “V/H/S” wears its nostalgia right there in the title.
At the same time, the world of avant-garde music was deep into its relationship with the synthetic. Many artists, up until that point, had been exploring the realm of the digital as an aesthetic but digital music interfaces like MIDI had become ubiquitous by the ’90s, fermenting the exponential growth of new scenes and genres in the avant-garde. Like any technological evolution, it took a decade for the new to become accessible to those who could find challenging and vital ways to make art, but the jump from analog to digital in the ’90s was, and still is, unmatched in paradigmatic changes.
It’s all become cool again, now. With TV shows like Stranger Things and the return of Twin Peaks, this era of a very particular kind of “weird” has been reanimated. In the case of the collaboration of Petridisch and Broken Machine Films, we have something both startlingly familiar yet confoundingly strange, paralleled in the title ‘358’.
Petridisch is, ostensibly, a drone artist. Like most drone artists, this particular label isn’t useful, but in the case of Petridisch, it is more unhelpful. The audio of ‘358’, which Petridisch is responsible for, is sequential, in contrast to much of drone. There is, in fact, almost a song-like consistency to Petridisch’s half of this collaboration, despite the fact that the soundtrack is presented as a nearly-thirty minute piece split precisely in half. For example, the opening piece, a deliciously conventional, Vocaloid-infused meditation, lasts a succinct three minutes before being consumed by a dystopian, throbbing soundscape of bass frequencies and android choirs that surge apocalyptically at times, buoyed by a piercing theremin-like centrepiece. Two minutes later, another squall of bass and elongated, horror-soundtrack synths lurch forth, concretely establishing the “Weird” aesthetic of Petridisch’s contributions.
Throughout “358”, Petridisch never quite veers away from bleak weirdness. At times embracing gloomy reverb or unsettling vocal samples, there’s only one exception to the diverse but uniformly perturbed “otherness” of ‘358’ and that’s the last three minutes of “358”. Petridisch’s synths shift, delicately, “upward”. While the moody, distant percussion beats thud dully in the background, the slow tide of sounds begins to warm subtly, until a vocoded tone rings out in striking contrast to the prior twenty-five minutes, speaking in a wordless, ascendent, encrypted melody. There’s a specific intent to what Petridisch presents both here and throughout, resembling a soundtrack and more than a soundtrack, with elements that, at least, hooked this listener.
The visual contribution, by Broken Machine Films, acts as a visual companion to the ?music? of “538”. The core component is the imitation and mutation of video artifacting or manipulation, of the kind endemic to VHS tapes. There’s a plethora of fuzzy, pulsing colors, carefully timed video interlacing, distortion waves that add a layer of malfunctioning artifice to the video. Like the music, the video element is dreamlike with a bleak atmosphere, incorporating cityscapes and industrial imagery punctuated by ominous forests or abstract ocean waves, all overlaid by mesmerizing visual modulations. There’s no story or coherence to be found here but Broken Machine Films exhibits an unsettling knack for creating memorable glimpses of something more than the seeming randomness. While there is a lot of “noise” there’s also moments of impressive, unexpected intensity in what seems like total abstraction.
‘538’ is a collaboration between record labels Illuminated Paths and I Heart Noise, the latter of which solicited my review of this DVD. I had no idea what to expect from it besides the fact that it would likely be “avant-garde” but having not heard Petridisch prior or seen any of Broken Machine Film’s work, I was absolutely stunned at how precisely ‘538’ struck a chord with me. As I watched it, I felt the same growing sense of dislocation and disorientation that the early work of David Lynch evoked, or Elias Merhige’s “Begotten”. ‘538’ is more than a music video but less than cinema. Despite having no narrative, it evoked in me a strong, specific emotional response, rooted in my younger years watching VHS tapes of creepy sci-fi films from the local video store and playing SNES games like Super Metroid or Gyruss. ‘538’ is certainly retro, or vintage, but it is absolutely avant-garde, demanding patience and attention from the viewer but being incredibly rewarding for anyone who values the weirdness of the ‘90s.
