Bandcamp The only text Bulbus put on this release is four sentences: a foray into the woods and below, the trees connect the ground to the mist, dig past the hoary roots and bury yourself, deeper, ever deeper. Bands write things like that constantly and almost none of them mean it structurally. This one does, and you can watch it happen.
Across the nine tracks the record’s tonal centre falls from roughly two and a half kilohertz to under five hundred. Track two is the brightest thing here by a wide margin. The closer, fifteen and a half minutes long, has more than half its energy below 250 hertz and essentially nothing above five kilohertz at all. The album does not describe a descent. It performs one.
Haarlem, alone
Everything here was written, performed, recorded and produced by Bulbus at a place called Studio Nekje, with no label, no outside engineer and no mastering credit to anybody else. That is what the Bandcamp credits say, and nothing on the record contradicts it. For a release this long and this physical, doing all of it alone is either reckless or very well judged, and it turns out to be the second: nothing here sounds thin, and the low end holds together through passages where a record made this way usually collapses into mud.
The sleeve is a photograph of forest floor at night, lit from close range, all roots and dead leaves and a pale mound of earth. Nothing supernatural, nothing drawn. Just the ground, photographed by somebody standing over it.
The shape
“Duality” opens on forty three seconds of a single quiet low tone, almost nothing, and then “Erase” arrives as the loudest and brightest thing on the album. That order is deliberate and slightly perverse: the record shows you the surface before it starts digging.
From there it goes down. “Red & Iron” and “A Chthonic Hymn” slow to a crawl and put a cave-sized reverb around everything, with the weight shifting steadily out of the midrange and into the bottom. “Bell Tower in the Ground” carries almost a third of its energy below 250 hertz, which is a lot of mud to move. “Requiem” abandons the band entirely for low drones. And “In Terra” closes on fifteen minutes that are darker than anything before them and still have the widest peak-to-average distance on the record, which is a difficult combination to achieve and the reason the final stretch feels enormous rather than merely long.
The one break in the pattern is “Harrower”, which jumps back up in brightness and opens the biggest swing between quiet and loud on the album. It is a very good track. It is also the moment the descent stops being a descent, and on a record built this carefully that is noticeable.
So
Recommended without much hesitation, and it is the kind of record that rewards being played in order and in one sitting, which I do not often say. The concept is real, the production holds up under self-made conditions that usually expose a band, and the fifteen minute closer earns every second of its length. The reservations are two: “Erase” sits awkwardly in a record otherwise committed to darkness, being louder and more processed than anything around it, and “Harrower” interrupts the descent just as it gets convincing. Neither is enough to stop this being one of the more quietly impressive things to come out of the Dutch underground this year.
The album’s structure is visible in the numbers. Tonal centre falls almost monotonically across the running order, from around 2.5 kilohertz on “Erase” through roughly 2.2, 1.5 and 1.3 in the middle to 982 hertz on “Requiem” and 478 hertz on the closer. Energy above five kilohertz follows it down, from seventeen percent on “Erase” to a fraction of a percent on the last two tracks, while the share below 250 hertz climbs from sixteen percent to nearly fifty two. “Duality” sits outside this entirely: forty three seconds with almost all of its energy in a single narrow band around 750 hertz and a peak-to-average distance of barely a decibel, which is the signature of a sustained quiet tone rather than a performance. The record is not flattened anywhere, peaks run thirteen to nearly eighteen decibels above average throughout, and “In Terra” has both the lowest tonal centre and the widest of those distances. “Harrower” is the structural exception, brighter than its neighbours and opening nearly twenty three decibels between its quietest and loudest passages.
Standout tracks: In Terra, Harrower, A Chthonic Hymn
