Kemper Norton’s self-released brunton calciner album is a work of industrial beauty, disturbing archaeology and curiously fitting electronics

When an artist describes their latest release as “a kind of 19th century industrial album inspired by arsenic production” then it at least warrants a listen. That I had held onto fond memories of Kemper Norton’s peculiarly ambient and folkloric Lowender from the start of the decade meant there were expectations to contend with. Thankfully, the sonic worldscape of brunton calciner sustains the intrigue of the concept and is too engrossing on its own terms to permit nostalgia for earlier work to creep in.

“iemas” slouches in with slightly drunken gait, as if from the pages of Thomas Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge; it evokes long, purposeful walks in a fictional past across Wessex fields. The first of three William Blake inspired pieces, “incence”, builds a near-throttling percussive wall out of cut-up voice and bubbling electronics. This is broken pastoral and Kemper Norton seems to channel reconstructed visions of Photek and Gazelle Twin across these sonic fields. “halan 1” has shades of Shane Carruth’s soundtrack work for his oblique SF cinema, teasing out its own unknowable narrative. Like a disturbing archaeological find, Kemper Norton’s version of “Sweet nightingale” is charged with the inevitable past come to snuff out the future. The delivery is frighteningly authentic, the dread that writhes through the words signalling ever-approaching wrongness. Think the uneasy experience of watching the BBC’s A Warning to the Curious.

“exprence” has the merest hint of Vangelis as it emerges, before taking on restrained post-rock form, like Mogwai challenged to cloak themselves in quiet. Whereas the ten-minute long “incexprence” builds into a coruscating sonic scream. There’s an alchemical process at work that somehow transforms the sound of a ZX Spectrum loading into Penderecki’s “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima”. The track almost invites worship, such is its terrible industrial beauty. Matters then settle down before drawing to a close. “Rn86” wears the garb of electronica, albeit uncommonly, as it marches through mists of memory, before “halan 3” lights out for the beyond.

Imagine Brian Eno’s On Land layered into Gavin Bryars’s “The Sinking of the Titanic” as produced by Jim O’Rourke. brunton calciner occupies just such an unmarked territory.  

kempernorton.bandcamp.com

Stewart Gardiner
Latest posts by Stewart Gardiner (see all)