Berlin-based artist Réelle readies their Ghamccccxc vRR LP for release on May 25th via Aisha Devi’s Danse Noire label. The upcoming album explores key moments before and during the Réelle’s first schizophrenic psychosis with the artist explaining:
“Schizophrenia is said to limit a person’s abilities overall. My discovery was that it opened a gate to limbic realms not accessible under normal circumstances–at least not to me.”
As we reported back in April when previewing the video for “Floating,” many of the sounds on Ghamccccxc vRR, as well as the title, were created during states of psychosis which means Réelle has no conscious memory of the process–or even why the album title was written down on a piece of paper.
As such Ghamccccxc vRR, as well as the Kissing Myself EP out earlier this month via Danse Noire, can be heard as a deeply personal and cathartic exploration of psychic turmoil–as well as the artist’s queer erotic practice. Utilizing Image Synthesis, rather than more traditional methods of musical composition, many of the sounds on these records were “painted” or “drawn” using brush tools–rather than played or programmed. This results in a gestural and expressionistic music filled with eerie textures, unintelligible voices, and gaps of negative space punctuated by violent disruptions and extreme outbursts of percussion and noise.
While the album’s first single, the haunting cut “Floating,” offered the fractured beauty of “limbic realms not accessible under normal circumstances,” many of the tracks on Ghamccccxc vRR might be experienced as the uncontrollable and chaotic onslaught of madness. Voices and strange chorale elements play throughout the album, but except for “Pink“‘s hypermasculine loop which seems to repeat the lines “Don’t cry/Lost two minutes of my life, bitch,” these are mostly inarticulate and indeterminable in content.
On a track like “Luciferian” they chant in forbidding and ritualistic tones, while the vocal melody on “Lilith” seems to mock sanity in a female sing-song. “Unfold” features chorale elements swirling just out of sensible reach, where “Hybris” finds hungry ghosts moaning with numb desire. Fascinating in the extreme, these are the kinds of voices that test the limits of stability and reason.
In addition, there is a jarring brutality that echoes throughout Ghamccccxc vRR. Many of the percussive elements on the record hit with violent physical force, as on “Head Held High? and “Pink,” where they burst viciously on the scene like a hand to the face or fist to the chest. When it’s not booming kick drum or the smack of snare, it’s ear-ripping bass drone as on “All I Have Left,” or aggressive emptying of desktop trash and the buzz of dental drills on “Kissing Myself.” In addition, Réelle’s chaotic sequencing throughout has a way of disrupting any semblance of order, and like a storm of inordinate neural activity, it continually wrecks havoc on the listener with its unsettling maelstrom of noise.
But, if Ghamccccxc vRR is experienced as a sonic ordeal, it might be only to convey the extremes of schizophrenic psychosis, and with it, Réelle proves themselves to be an artist of the highest order. This is a work of intense bravery, and it demands as much from the listener. Having suffered the vicissitudes of sanity, they have returned from the brinks of crisis only to transform the experience into a challenging and unforgettable work of art.
