Anakrid - Rapture of the Deep (Stereonucleosis Records LP)

Pardon my absence yesterday, things came up as they tend to do! But I've come back twice strong and with the final installment of the Anakrid records couplet I received some time ago. Note the album art falling in line with the last one - the back cover does the same too but you can't tell from that picture. And apparently Chris Bickel's got other records released in the same sort of "series" format. And I read he'll keep doing it till he runs out of cash. Which is admirable and all the more reason for you to investigate his recordings. Foolishly I forgot to mention last time around that both these babies are 180 gram vinyl so not only can the child in you appreciate it but so too can the audiophilic adult! I was warned by M. Bickel that the second record was quite a different monster than the first ("Father") although I can't remember if he suggested that it was better, I might've imagined it. But whether he said it or not it's the truth - I liked "Father" a whole lot but "Rapture of the Deep" is even greater, and while I suggest getting both, this one would be the unmissable one of the set.
The first side of "Rapture" is comprised of three phases, titled "Air into Water", "Wilt" and "Electrik Leviathan Rising". I have a hard time remembering where things begin and end but I'm able to report that there's a couple (if not three!) of shiny, shimmering, superbly-erected towers of chromus dronus, blisteringly white-hot as well as being as frigid as the air bubbles inside ice cubes. It filters out through the speakers like Brita water-cum-Eliane Radigue's terse laptop compositions. The jams Bickel put together (without his usual Anakrid colleagues I'm assuming because their names don't appear) practically glow with a synthy, syrupy radiance fully removed from the ear canal eruption banked on by current new-noise drone practicioners like John Olson's Waves project. The flip side runs even smoother, with three more tracks named "The Behemoth Awakens After 2000 Years Satisfying Sleep", "Memories of Submersion" and "Electrik Leviathan: The Rapture". Starts out gently like the opening notes from Ariel Kalma's classic field recording/instrument synthesis "Osmose" (particularly the first track "Saxo Planetariel") and then gently slides into a liquid landslide of dream-woven, hazy robotic gloss and gleam. Delicately ominous but never disturbing, it's a perfect cloud-drifting soundtrack and sounds exactly like the decidedly non-sound that rings in your head when you hold your breath under water for an extended period of time. Only without the added bonus of death! Quite a great record indeed and definitely a worth successor to STRNU 101 (that is, "Father"). If you see em in a distro somewhere and you're looking to fill out an order, you can do no worse than these two slabs from Anakrid. I'll have to be keeping the name on my mental too because I have one of those funny feelings (no not THOSE funny feelings) that the best is still to come from this particular unit.