EE08: HUMAN LARVAE – HOME IS WHERE THE HURT IS CD
Introducing the debut full-length of this new Dresden based heavy industrial/power electronics unit following his 3 inch CDR on Silken Tofu. Taking cues from styles as diverse as the cinematic Navicon Torture Technologies and grungy lo-fi …Today I’m Dead, Human Larvae delivers an emotional torrent of self-destructive force with “Home is Where the Hurt Is”. Spanning a running time of over an hour, styles range from rhythmic orchestral industrial to bleak passages of black noise with a good dosage of throbbing feedback and scathing vocals. There is some sick twisted narrative to be found here but the search for these mysterious happenings will bring you to places you may never return from.
- I Feel Therefore I Hurt
- Radiation Wasteland [Excerpt]
- Rapist Pig [Full Track]
- I Do This Because I Love You
- To Hide in Her Uterus and Hopefully Suffocate in Absolute Tranquility
- A Celebration of Open Skin [Excerpt]
- Tis My Desire to Loath in the Fires of Vengeance
- Lips Will Bleed + Hearts Will Break [Excerpt]
- Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust
- Each copy hand numbered and assembled.
- Pro-pressed CD limited to 500 copies.
- Black and metallic red ink printed on recycled heavy stock.
- Beautifully rendered design by Monica Greenwald.
REVIEWS
From Special Interests #2:
I had heard many good things about this project. Knowing his earlier harsh noise unit Broken Diode being good, I still hesitated checking out previous 3″cdr release simply due to format. Now Existence Establishment label from the USA was bold enough to invest money on full color digisleeve CD in edition of 500 copies, which should be enough to get Human Larvae in ears of people. One could think about the new wave of power electronics/industrial but Human Larvae is diverse enough that album overall sounds his own.
Each track stands on its own, offering well done compositions. Often heavy and “smoothly” fuzzed keyboard tones, eerie ambient tones, spoken word clips, vocal attacks. There is a track which is such a static fuzzy synth with distant background elements, it brings me clear reflections of for example Shift “Bulk” CD. Or grunting low vocal sounds in some tracks similar to some tracks of later day Prurient. Name dropping could include Control, FITH, Propergal, Strom.ec, and so on.
This being debut full length one could say that Human Larvae is a force to be acknowledged. His ability to blend in ambient textures, heavy synth drones, rhythmic percussion loops, and even melodic keyboards is beyond the average. It is done with taste and is not afraid to cross over the borders of “pure” genres. This makes the project at the same time hard to “sell” for audience who wants band who stays in specific category, but rewarding for those who actually give it a chance.
I listened to this 3 times during the same day and once more during the writing of this review and I can’t say I would have spent that much time with almost any of “new school” PE related albums that last over 1 hour. Strongly recommended. – Mikko Aspa
From Plagve Haus:
Germany’s Human Larvae is another project from the man behind harsh noise outfit Broken Diode. This disc explores more Death Industrial and Dark Ambient territory, although still making use of some noisier elements. Immediately I was struck by the similarities to Navicon Torture Technologies, so much so that if someone passed me a burned copy of the disc and told me it was the latest from NTT, I’d be inclined to believe them. This isn’t a bad thing at all.
Like the above mentioned NTT, Human Larvae features heavy use of ominous sounding synth drones, loops and lots of sampling. He also seems to have that penchant for degenerate sexual themes and self-loathing. I’ll admit at first I was a bit put off by the vocals on the opener “I Feel Therefore I Hurt”. I though if the Pest-esque sounding refrain of “Kill! Your! Self!” was going to be the norm, we can stop here. Apparently it was just for effect as a more Power Electronics style is adopted later in the track. “Radiation Wasteland” explores more Dark Ambient territory with some abrasive synth and creepy panting female. “Rapist Pig” I liked a lot, making use of some clanging metal percussion and little bits of melody that peek through the grime every once in awhile. Samples of sexual depravity are probably clichéd at this point in extreme electronics, but I have to admit I never seem to tire of them. The delayed cries of the female victim in some BDSM playtime under the pulsing synth of “I Do This Because I Love You” are quite enjoyable.
“To Hide In Her Uterus And Hopefully Suffocate In Absolute Tranquility” is another more PE sounding track. Solid enough, but like it’s title maybe a bit over long. “A Celebration Of Open Skin” was for me the weakest track, just a lot of delayed noise and didn’t really grab me, but “Tis My Desire To Loath In The Fires Of Vengeance” more than makes up for it. While there’s a fair amount of aggression, there’s also a downright beautiful melody driving the whole thing along. The combination of the melancholy keyboards and banging junk percussion works well together. “Lips Will Bleed + Hearts Will Break” is a buzzing Death Industrial number featuring a movie sample I can’t place and will bug me the rest of the day. The disc ends with “A Loss Too Great To Bear”, another mournful piece that sounds almost like Gregorian chants while someone slides something heavy and damp through the cathedral. The perfect closer.
This disc is limited to 500 and comes housed in a nice cardboard slipcase with amazing artwork, the veins of a human heart superimposed over an old house and trees on some forgotten landscape. Beautiful. So bottom line, if you’re into that nasty Death Industrial sound from the likes of NTT or Steel Hook Prostheses, you’re sure to enjoy this one.
From Musique Machine:
“Thanks to: family and friends for inspiration”, it makes you wonder what inspiration this could be, as Home Is Where The Hurt Is drags you in into a pitchblack pool of noise, dark ambient and power electronics that seems to be an adequate depiction of nothing less than hell.
The Dresden based project’s first full-length—after an initial limited 3″ cdr release on Silken Tofu—is a disturbing trip, spiralling into a soundworld that’s menacing yet quite diverse. Unlike some other powerelectronics Human Larvae uses dynamics and a spatial mix of brooding synths under the huge washes of distorted mayhem. Voices screech through layers of creepy effects and the sounds of a woman crying and screaming in I Do This Because I Love You truly makes you feel rather uneasy. Thick, subsonic dronecycles steadily provide a pace and giving the album a flow, sometimes ebbing into a dark industrial landscape only to swell into a menacing tsunami of noise.
Rather than a relentless punishment of the senses, Home Is Where The Hurt Is creates a pitchblack atmosphere that gets under your skin while the whip of noise lashes out regularly. The distorted vocals that occasionally crawl from out of the turmoil add a bit of songstructure, to add some more distress. Human Larvae takes you into a dark and unpleasant world, not for the faint at heart. Comes in a pretty, handnumbered digipack in an edition of 500.
From Heathen Harvest:
The broken skin of Human Larvae irrupts in lumpy nests of noise that swiftly spread a backdrop to which the chant of “Kill yourself” is lizardly spoken. Then the noise of Human Larvae crushes like crystal in a gargantuan grinding machine crisp and sharp with the roar of a thousand whispers as if exploding from a fumarole. A digital volcano with manic vociferations hurled like chunks of rock, the tracks on “Home is Where the Hurt Is” are as disturbing as they are surprising in their twists of rhythm and suspense.
The shredded rhythms are hypnotic and ritualistic, the rusted noises at so low a frequency that they engage involuntary stomach-contraction without adding to the tinnitus. The atmospherics are sinister in ambience and enhance the moments of ululating low end reverberations. Twists of dub tricks are intertwined with crushing percussion and droning distortion, where even the lyrics rhythmically enjoin. Intense bands of noise and soft aetherics form the palette of chiaroscuro. With room for melody, heavily butchered when it does surface in odd contortions, Human Larvae lifts the album from a run of the mill noise-a-thon.
“Home is Where the Hurt Is” is a unique crossbreed of styles and sounds that will appeal beyond the closed niches and keenly shows an evolution in techniques and not just a desire to be loud, offensive and constant. However, the employment of strained female breathing and the use of BDSM samples of a woman undergoing an ordeal might make it unpleasant for some.
A spined digifile gatefold pack on matte black card, “Home is Where the Hurt Is” is tastefully designed, with the use of blood vessel etchings to further limn as if in dripping blood a black and white silhouetted landscape designed as wraparound. Typography is tastefully employed in the liner notes to make it one tidy package.
From Club Debil:
Musikalisch ist Human Larvae erneut ein großer Wurf gelungen. Zwar bezeichnet der Künstler sein Werk selbst als Power Electronics bzw. Noise, doch so ganz stimmt das nicht. Ist man von Vertretern des Genres doch eher eine Hau-Drauf-Attitüde gewohnt, volle 120 Prozent über die gesamte Länge des Tonträgers. Das kann zwar gut gehen, langweilt in vielen Fällen aber nur.
Human Larvae verfolgt einen anderen Ansatz: Die wirklich heftigen Ausbrüche werden durch ambiente Passagen zusammen gehalten. Es gelingt dem Musiker echte Spannungsbögen aufzubauen und den Hörer so auch über die Länge der ganzen CD zu fesseln. Die Samples sind zum Teil sehr krass, so bei “Rapist Pig”, so dass das Zuhören nicht immer “Spaß” macht. Wie die einzelnen Titel aber auch das sehr schöne Artwort nahe legen, geht es auf “Home Is Where The Hurt Is” nicht um Friede, Freude, Eierkuchen aber auch nicht um irgendwelche Verschwörungstheorien oder sonstige verquere Weltanschauungen, sondern einzig und allein um die Abgründe zwischenmenschlicher Beziehungen. Die können gelegentlich sehr tief und schmerzhaft sein. Human Larvae ist es gelungen, dafür eine hörenswerte musikalische Umsetzung zu schaffen. Ihr Soundspektrum reicht dabei weit über das Genreübliche hinaus, bindet zum Beispiel auch neoklassische Melodien ein, und verleiht dem Ganzen dadurch zusätzliche Kraft. Sehr gute Platte!
From Idwal Fisher:
You could aim the same arrow at Human Larvae except that what we have here is made with so much more feeling and contains so much more passion that it makes Stratvm Terror sound like Burl Ives. Yes its a power electronics/Industrial ambience album and yes it contains plenty of PE clichés but its all done with such professionalism and with such care that you just cant help being impressed.
This is Human Larvae’s first full length release and there seems to have been a great feasting on classic PE albums. Track titles such as “I Do This Because I Love You’, ‘A Loss Too Great To Bear’ and ‘To Hide In Her Uterus And Hopefully Suffocate In Absolute Tranquility’ reveal a deep thinker at large thus elevating this from being just another misogynistic, misanthropic outing. Home Is Where The Hurt Is also contains some genuinely unsettling moments. The sound of a womans terrified screams on the aforementioned ‘I Do This ..’ is enough to bring comparison to darker Runzelstirn and Gurgelstock moments. My only complaint is that a lot of these tracks tend to outstay their welcome. There’s nine tracks here spanning an hour which, given the material and subject matter is heavy going. Still, crank up your stereo, get out your snuff mags and indulge in some solid PE. It sure beats replicating hell in your living room.
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