Bank of Forever’s post-industrial transmissions from slow rooms are maze-like staging areas that dismantle cause and effect

Bank of Forever’s Music for Navigating is a report from the interior. A series of ambient signals returned from the Zone; synaptic transmissions to be translated as psychic maps. Each piece is a staging area, a place of dead roads, reflecting on part of a journey that has just occurred. Music for Navigating takes inspiration from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, yet it is a post-industrial calibration that owes as much to the death-as-sex impulses of JG Ballard’s Crash.

The industrial design of the sleeve – pitch black with monospaced typeface set in white – is even more striking on the limited run cassette, which is the monolith from 2001 given a Brutalist makeover. There are hints of a Ballard/Throbbing Gristle aesthetic on this and other releases from Listening Center’s micro-label Temporary Tapes. The stark minimalism suggests rather than belies the depths within.

Bank of Forever Music for Navigating

The initial dispatch, “Guide”, is an interrogation of the self played out as an inner noir. Chris Carter’s techno soundscapes may be a reasonably useful point of reference, but the linearity of references is perhaps less useful here, for Bank of Forever traps successive moments in a forever-parallel. “Guide” seems to say at once that there’s a storm coming / the storm continues / the storm has happened. Cause and effect has been dismantled and electronic waves sweep up the remains of you. “Tunnel” is on the edge of “Slow 30s Room” by David Lynch and Dean Hurley. Rhythmic machinery pounds away in a close distance, recalling something from the exterior of the ruined city of Eraserhead; the exterior is interiorised. Bank of Forever’s transmissions arrive from the depths of slow rooms.

The pistons in the dark of “Seeking” reveal machine hearts of broken techno. “Eidolon” is where the curtains part and systems open up, allowing moments to be taken outside the Zone. It’s here that Bank of Forever intersects with the work of Listening Center, the sound of light refracting off of crystals. Evolving synth lines remain determinedly maze-like; expansive ambience toying with its own circuitry. “Eidolon” plays over the title sequence of an imaginary adaptation of Ballard’s The Drowned World.

“Stasis” evokes rudimentary readouts and Robert Wise’s version of The Andromeda Strain. A research centre emptied of people, banks of computer terminals blinking on and off with nobody there to monitor them. Cleansing synths ripple through the room, letting fluorescent light flood in as a new dawn fades. The last dispatch, “Reentry”, loops what sounds like a colossal machine bat flapping its wings, giving the sensation that time is being ripped backwards. The track builds a new temporal structure where moments overlap and infect one another, somewhere between the march of time and Sisyphean struggle. Stumbling through a shifting multiplicity of progression that is no progression at all, each step taken is a step into the ever-present. The infernal flapping may suggest an attempt to take flight, but escape is not the intention. Bank of Forever posits another path and it is one that this listener cannot stop setting foot upon. Music for Navigating keeps pulling me back in, its interiors ripe to be explored indefinitely.

bankofforever.bandcamp.com/music-for-navigating

Stewart Gardiner
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