JOHN WATERMANN

"Calcutta Gas Chamber" (reissue)

Cold Spring - 2006

CD

John Watermann was a composer, filmmaker and performer of German origin who lived most of his life in Australia. Several recordings of experimental, ambient and industrial music were published under his name as well as other pseudonyms, such as Spinal Machine and Total Disease. John passed away in 2002, but a few unreleased works and some reissues have been released during the last years, including the here present "Calcutta Gas Chamber", one of his most interesting and significative efforts.

This CD, originally published by American label ND back in 1993, is to be ideally intended as the soundtrack to an hallucinatory documentary shot inside a large gas chambers complex located outside Calcutta. The atmosphere of such creepy and frightening place are perfectly evoked by the skilled combination of minimal dark ambient with authentic field recordings taken inside the place. You will listen to the sound of machineries, steel prison doors, chains, the echo of narrow underground corridors leading the condemned to death, voices weeping and murmuring in Hindi, guards commenting the executions or prisoners waiting for the fatal moment. The aim of this record doesn't seem to be stimulating reflections about death penalty, or denouncing the inhuman treatment of the condemned in India back at the time (recordings were done in 1990). This is a document, and must be therefore regarded as a mean of information.

It's hard to remain indifferent to "Calcutta Gas Chamber", so frightening and unsettling is everything about it: the topic, the music, the sounds, the samples... you will be either morbidly attracted by it or keep distance. Probably, this CD goes beyond any dark ambient ever heard in terms of oppressing atmospheres and feelings. This is what, for example, Atrium Carceri has tried to do till now without successing at all. An appropriate way to remember John Watermann, even if of course not everyone will be brave enough to reach the end of the disc's running time.

- Simon V.

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