### Buried At Sea: Migration

#### 13/07/09 || Khlysty

This record starts with the noise of an amp being turned on and feedbacking. This is the last fucking warning you’ll get to leave off immediately and go listen something nicer or, at least, not this ugly and hostile. You got a few seconds and, then, WHAMO!!! The dam bursts and a maelstrom of the deepest, most vile, most suffocating sludge covers everything. If desperation combined with total rage ever needed a soundtrack, “Migration” would be choice #1 for it. This is not extreme doom, but something approaching the sounds of Apocalypse. If you can imagine Neurosis at their most strung-out covering Trouble, then you might get an idea of what I’m talking about.

Buried At Sea is one of the numerous projects guitarist-vocalist and producer extraordinaire Sanford Parker has taken part in during the last decade and it’s probably his most extreme and user-unfriendly. Taking cues from doom, drone and noise, the three unnamed pieces (or “movements”) that comprise “Migration” are so fucking dense sonically, that they create a palpable sense of pressure and physical discomfort to the listener. The guitars are distorted to point of almost uncontrollable feedback, the bass sounds like subterranean boulders slowly tumbling into unimaginable abysses and the drums have a sound like bones smashing on freshly slaughtered flesh. The sparse vocals are tortured screams, mixed really low and just adding to the whole hellish ambience of the recording.

Speaking of ambience, the fuckers have filled the record choke-full of a gazillion of little noises: running water, the creaking of wood, voices, scratching and a lot of other unidentifiable thingies that run through the whole length of the almost-forty-minutes recording. Most of the time they’re buried under the weight of the guitars, but they come out in the open during the lulls between the three pieces, or show their ugly nature when the volume drops, something which happens from time to time –I guess the band does this so as to prevent the listeners from asphyxiating under the sheer volume of the music. Also, there are minor changes to the rhythm, which goes from sloth-like to funereal, just to keep the blood flowing and the dementia rising and keep on rising till the appropriately apocalyptic ending.

I know that this sounds like torture and to the majority of the audience it probably is. Me, as I’ve made clear, I like extreme doom most of the time, so I enjoy “Migration” very much. I find the orchestration of the three lengthy “movements” extremely well-crafted, the musicianship smart and economic and the whole package very alluring. I won’t tell you that you’ve never heard such music before. But, I bet that you’ve never heard such music done so powerfully and smartly. So the choice is yours. No pain, no gain…

8 out of 10.

- Information
- Released: 2003
- Label: Original Sound Recordings
- Website: www.myspace.com/buriedatsea
- Band
- Brian Sowell: bass, tapes, synths, vocals
- Jason Depew: guitar, tapes, synths
- Sanford Parker: guitar, tapes, synths, vocals
- Bill Daniel: drums

- Tracklist
- 01. Movement 1
- 02. Movement 2
- 03. Movement 3