Bell Barrow, a project formed by Saccharine Underground label curator Jeremy Moore, exists in a world of noise broken into fractal shards and sent spiralling off down a hall of mirrors. With myriad influences, from the unsettling soundscapes of Skullflower to the hypnotic feedback experiments of Sonic Youth on their SYR series of releases, Bell Barrow crafts intense moods out of abstract textures, with such melody as there is existing largely in the listener’s own imagination. As such, latest album CoreCore Pulp should be approached with both caution and curiosity by music fans.
The album opens with An Eye On The Future. It takes nearly four minutes for the track to coalesce into anything approaching form – when a somnolent beat emerges to drive the icy shards of noise towards its conclusion. A forbidding and formidable opening, it seems tailor made to scare off the uninitiated but, for those who persevere, the churning K-hole of Recidivism finds Bell Barrow exploring a post-rock environment as much influenced by Miles Davis’s seminal Bitches Brew as it is by the apocalyptic no-wave of Glenn Branca. Darkly compelling, it flashes by in a mere three minutes, only for the eight-minute Coffin Text to offer no such concessions to sanity. Riddled with feedback and jazzy progressions, it’s an epic-length exercise in spacey noise rock, nodding occasionally to Floyd’s early Saucerful Of Secrets-era material, albeit with a jazzier underpinning.
Arguably the first piece to drift, at least slightly, into accessible territory, Algolagnia has the sort of creeping bass line Radiohead enjoyed deploying circa-OK Computer, although the skittish percussion and angular slivers of guitar keep things from settling into too obvious a pattern. Nevertheless, there is a groove here, for all the obfuscation, and it proves a surprisingly engaging piece. This is rather less the case with the static-washed nightmare of The Shining Sleep, which opens in a post-industrial hellscape reminiscent of Silent Hill. A grinding, burnt-out husk of a track that sounds like a rusted factory screaming as its aged cogs are once more forced into movement, it raises the hairs on the nape of the neck, leaving the listener feeling lost and isolated in its terrible embrace. Fortunately, Glass Negative provides at least some relief, the grating noise dialled back to allow a colder, more brittle sound to emerge, evoking the titular substance as a single guitar echoes in the darkness.
With the album having reached its halfway point, Bell Barrow shows little mercy. The gruelling noise of Virgin Collapse feels like a sonic endurance test – tinnitus-inducing frequencies scraping away layer after layer of the listener’s resolve. As such, it’s a relief when the slippery rhythms of Compendium introduce some forward momentum, dragging the listener clear of the wreckage. It can’t last, however, and the backwards-phased noise of Monoglove finds the band once more leading the listener through an alien landscape where every lifeform is potentially lethal. At points, the track resembles nothing so much as the eerie noises put out by the alien probe in Star Trek IV (there’s a reference I never thought to write), elsewhere, harsh electronic noise shimmers uneasily at the heart of the track’s imploding core.
Percussion once more comes to the rescue on Peace Field Autopsy. Almost a conventional song, it features a carefully aligned rhythm section, and if the guitars remain dazed and confused, the semi-conventional arrangement nevertheless allows some semblance of respite, although the rug is soon pulled from beneath the listener as the rhythms collapse into an ambient scree. Rather more bruising, Microtomes is an art-jazz assault on the senses featuring some incredibly nimble bass work. It leaves From Hunter To Remains to see this awkward and off-kilter album to its conclusion, the slow-moving piece providing a suitably eerie coda to what has come before.
Music such as this is very much for a select few. Neither destined nor designed for the mainstream, it is both a labour of love and a work of art and, on that level, it succeeds perfectly. For fans of the obscure and the extreme, CoreCore Pulp is a heady trip that draws you into dark recesses of social media manipulation and the worst voyeuristic impulses of a capitalist culture run rampant. Unsettling and genuinely unique, Bell Barrow’s CoreCore Pulp is a memorable voyage into the unknown. 8/10
