QUIET FLYNT - A Creeping Process

8 songs
40:37 minutes
***** ****
(self-released)

Bandpage

It must have been nearly ten years since I last heard new music from Claude Michels you used to perform as Sermeq back then. He recently resurfaced as Quiet Flynt, and while he still plays electronic music, he has taken a turn to darker moods. A Creeping Process is now the first album under the new name, and it is certainly not for the faint of heart.

The opener Chaos Charisma combines chillingly cold synth textures with an echoing string instrument and discreet percussion. Close your eyes and you see yourself shivering in a post-apocalyptic urban landscape. The following Flaming Clouds isn’t any gentler, maybe even a little bleaker, with distorted overdriven noises that sound like metal grating on metal. Blender is a rare track that contains a beat and is therefore even danceable, if you still feel like dancing after what preceded. Sections takes the beat out of the song again, but feels somewhat more conciliatory before we turn towards strange sounds again with Into The Endless Field with spoken word samples by Syd Barrett. Waves is a remix of a track by Ryvage, and also here Quiet Flynt manages to take the last bit of cheerfulness out of the music, only leaving some of the vocoder vocals that let you recognise the source material. Dead Woods is another happy tune... not! We really get it now: this is like cyberpunk when the drugs don’t work anymore and you are forced to face the bleakness all around you. The album concludes with Fog Scenes Part 1, a live track featuring Mono-Drone on all kinds of strange acoustic instruments.

At times A Creeping Process feels just like that: songs worked out over years, stringed together with a remix, a danceable track and a live piece, to have just enough material for a longplayer. The genius behind it is that it works. It’s maybe not the ideal soundtrack while driving your car, but late at night, it can be a comforting listening experience, a soundtrack that is as disillusioned as the times we are currently living through. I doubt that Quiet Flynt can sound even more despairing. This is a masterpiece of authentic pitch black ambient.