Zurkas Tepla released his Occasion Smell LP via Klammklang in late May. This is the fourth album for the Moscow-based sonic explorer and it follows up on his 2017 LPs Bank Robber/In The Same Car out on Forest Swords’ Dense Truth label, as well as Permanent Research on the Russian label
Full Of Nothing. Using texture and timbre to explore extreme sonic worlds, Occasion Smell will find you adrift in some of the artist’s most frightening work yet.
Peripatetic ambiance provides a wandering structure across the album’s six tracks. Atmospheres of dread and desolation bleed into gestural acts of aural violence as Tepla explores these eerie environments. Like finding yourself in a first-person shooter game without a weapon, and with danger around every corner, Occasion Smell will have you walking the razor’s edge.
What’s most disconcerting here, though, is the sense you might be the only human left in this nightmarish place. Sure, wastelands of concrete and glass abound, and the smoke of some recent disaster still lingers, but listening to “White Hands Washed Eye Black Gas” and “Estrade Variety” just might have you wondering where everybody’s gone. That’s not to say there’s plenty lurking here, it’s just of the inorganic and spectral variety. These are sonic dangers sent to prey upon you, and the fact that you can’t quite see them, but can definitely feel them as sound, is enough to make the hair on the back of your neck stand up.
“Rehearsal Of Repeat” finds a retinue of hungry ghosts nipping at your heels and their Siren-like call seems intended to induce madness, while “Pets Conversation” unleashes a swarm of noisy shadows that seem to hover and swoop with vampiric intent. The strange audio beings inhabiting “Kazus Perevodchika” might not have your life in their sights, but that’s because smothering and groping is more their thing. And then, just when you thought you might be out of the woods, “Dirt Digging Nose” brings you a fascinatingly vicious entity of unknown cosmic origins. Running amok in a field of battering rhythms and capable of delivering soul-crushing laser blasts at rapid-fire speed, it’s truly GAME OVER for you now.
