Yair Etziony: Deliverance
False Industries

Yair Etziony's sixth full-length takes as its starting point a biblical psalm that reads “You are my hiding place; you will protect me from trouble and surround me with songs of deliverance.” Who or what the ‘you' is in this album-related context isn't explicitly clarified, though one possibility is that it's simply music; perhaps it was this that provided both succour and protection to Etziony as he dealt with the many challenges incurred by the move he recently made from Tel Aviv to Berlin.

Regardless, the six-track release presents Etziony operating in dark ambient mode, the material brooding, portentous, and suffused with no small amount of atmospheric disturbance. Working with modular synths, vintage Roland gear, and state-of-the-art software, Etziony has produced an understated yet nonetheless powerful set of dread-fueled soundscapes.

Issued on his own False Industries label, Deliverance is very much a portrait of an industrial landscape dominated by machinery. “Justice” opens the album dramatically with a multi-layered mass of reverb-drenched hydraulic noises and metallic textures, the tone unsettling and claustrophobic; some cautious hint of hope does emerge, however, near the track's end when a bright synthesizer pattern and drum beat cut through the smothering cloud. It's not the only time rhythm elements surface to breathe animated life into the material. During “Unheimlich,” for instance, an oppressive field of strings and horns is buoyed, if ever so slightly, by a lumbering pulse of primal drums and a burbling synthesizer pattern, while the swaying rhythm of tabla-like instrumentation brings a different colour to the the title track's machine-dominated scene-painting.

March 2018