Salford Electronics is one of the Grey Wolves, whom I gather have now ceased trading as a collective concern. I have to admit that I'm only loosely familiar with what the lads have been up to during the past couple of decades. I'm assuming they didn't have a Bavarian oompah phase or spend a couple of years as a sixteen piece ska band, but my estimation of where this disc stands in relation to the last few Grey Wolves releases, sonically speaking, will probably be somewhat off target, so you may have to bear with me.
The Grey Wolves I remember were nothing if not confrontational, where Salford Electronics seems to be a less demonstrative concern. Somebody somewhere will already have described Communique No. 2 as dark ambient, which I'm not going to do because I'm trying to discourage the use of such silly terms, and because the music of Lustmord is always described as a dark ambient, and this is much better than Lustmord—pardon me, I meant Lustmørd. The plain black cover seems as initially inscrutable as the ten electroacoustic soundscapes on the disc, but as with patterns seen once you've gazed into the shadows for sufficient length of time, some sort of narrative emerges after a few plays; or rather a non-narrative because Communique No. 2 feels like what we're left with once all the words have been used up, nothing left to say, which it could be argued constitutes a statement in its own right. There are no songs, tunes, melodies, nor even rhythm - well, not exactly - just a pseudo-organic noise resembling that which endures when there's no-one left behind to operate the machinery. It's the sound of concrete, underground car parks, waste disposal machines going through the motions in a world denuded of humanity - what happens to the cities after we've gone, like an urban cousin to Nocturnal Emissions' invocations of the natural world. It ceases to be ambient once you turn it up to the sort of volume at which it deserves to be heard.
Very impressive.
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