- Quell is an industrial, experimental, ebm / darkwave project out of Naarm / Melbourne. Its stock in trade ranges from eerie soundscapes, through shrieks of grinding metal and other unsettling found sounds to the hallmark crashing electro beats of ebm. This reasonably wide palette is certainly what attracted me to the new EP, Endless and the darkly tinted spectrum paints a ‘tumultuous’ relationship with ‘a man of professional violence’, so I’m told. Well, the tumultuous bit was obvious.

The backstory does actually sound pretty interesting, not to mention traumatic. It is also, still, pretty mysterious, as mysterious as the rather anonymous figure behind this solo project. They describe the theme of the EP’s opener, Degenerate, but in a way that speaks to the record as a whole:

I was in fairly deep with a man who did violence for money. While there were many elements of his character (if not most) that I found abhorrent, there was something there that I was drawn to. I found his ‘hardness’ ridiculous and performative, and it was hard to know whether anything he said was true, but it wasn’t contestable that he was a product of a system much larger and more violent than he could match. The prison-industrial system had formed in him the caricature of a ‘criminal’ and it seemed he’d taken it on as a means of survival, wearing the ‘degenerate’ stamp like another patch on his jacket. If nothing else, I could in some tangential way relate to that. 

Endless is a musical illustration of this intense meeting of minds and -jammed with over-the-top electro- is quite distinct from Quell’s back-catalogue. There you’ll find much more of those experimental industrial and found-sounds and while the 2019, self-titled EP takes in a little darkwave / EBM, earlier work, including a split with the similarly wide-ranging Ov Pain is almost wholly ambient-industrial. To quote the creator again, the throbbing beats of Endless are actually “using the camp bravado of the genre to present the facade of the man who inspired the record”. It’s almost as if they wouldn’t have deigned to indulge in something so crass unless they had a subject so gross, calling for it. I suppose it’s a cousin to the way Slovenian totalitarian icons Laibach use martial-industrial to satirise the Soviet enterprise. As familiar as I am with that kind of thing, it makes me scratch my head all the more at how taken aback I was, when I learned the overarching theme of Endless and by Quell’s ironic intentions on cuts like Degenerate, Behind The Eye and First Incident; maybe because I was actually enjoying it straight up? That might be my machismo showing; awkward!

I’m glad to have these strange, brutal yet somehow tender liner notes to Endless, which would otherwise remain fairly opaque. There are some samples like a convict and his mother discussing their experience of the prison-industrial complex (unrelated to the actual people the EP is about, I believe) in the title track and a few others of even less clear provenance. There’s also the occasional snatch of studio-mutated and indecipherable vox studding the explosions of beats out of the industrial soundscapes, all given some context now.

Even without explanation, Endless is an intriguing storm of sounds from some of the most visceral genres of electronic music. Its story adds strange undertones of a masculinity both violent, but, as I said, more complicated - gentler, sadder. The music we listen to is a way of performing our own inner lives and I feel like I was getting down to crushing beats in a dark, dingy, 2am club when mine collided with this tumultuous relationship.

- Chris Cobcroft.