Final - I Am the Dirt Under Your Fingernails (2002)

I first encountered Final back in the eighties when we both turned up on the same compilation tape. I got into Godflesh a bit late in the day - late nineties or thereabouts - and at least another decade had passed before I made the connection, that both were the work of the same individual, namely Justin Broadrick. This made a lot of sense despite Final and Godflesh sounding very different to each other. I Am the Dirt Under Your Fingernails also sounds significantly different to what I'd heard of Final back in the eighties, but then a fair bit of time has passed and this shares the same concrete-density as much of Broadrick's other work.

I detect what may have been feedback, but otherwise it's anyone's guess where these sounds originated. Mine would be that whatever it is we have here was recorded on traditional tape then slowed to a sludge-crawl to the point where even the shrillest of screams is reduced to a bass rumble hung precipitously on the edge of hearing, even the slightest variation in tape speed stretched to tonal craters in what is very much a sonic landscape; and the occasional flicker of drop-out may even be spaghettified gaps between molecules of ferric oxide. Anal Probe, who issued the compilation where I first heard Final, had a photocopied catalogue listing destroyed music amongst the vague genres in which they specialised, and I'm fairly sure that's what we have here.

That said, whatever the first thing to hit you may be when you listen to this disc, discordant racket somehow doesn't figure. Minutes passed before I noticed I'd been listening to this thing very much as music rather than merely engaging noise. The notes we've been left with are long and mournful, evoking mist, rain, and vast spaces from which life has moved on. The best description I can come up with - and which occurred to me as I was listening - was if the first SPK album felt like listening to Elgar. There's something monolithic here, something carved in stone and so weathered as to be barely recognisable, something which has left behind a sense of loss as big as the world.