Trimmed Limbs: A Sense of Wonder

Trimmed Limbs: A Sense of Wonder

(Diskotopia)

Out Now

Stretching and pressing against a spectrum of musical conventions until a new one is forced to emerge, on A Sense of Wonder, the new album from Trimmed Limbs, the mixing desks of both the mind and body reach their paragon of weight and space. Album Review and Interview by Ryan Walker.

Trimmed Limbs has been defined as an exercise in ”immediacy, intent and integration.”

Dialling into the depths of the inner channel through grizzly, mutated explorations of post-punk frameworks, and dabbling with unsettling experimentations of industrial sounds and splintered, dub methodology, in the wake of this year’s Modes as NIIKKOLAHS and Culture On Wind as Inner Channel, A Sense Of Wonder is the third Diskotopia release from Trimmed Limbs. ”Reflective of the first outer layer of emotional response, which can be more intense or reactionary compared to Niikkolahs or Inner Channel material,” such a variety of aliases must not be understated in their continuity from one to the next. Their lineage is one electrified by a sense of psychedelic connection. A cosmic bullet. A spiritual foundation. But don’t let such aspects of the body of work at hand be mistaken for any kind of whimsical, new age rhetoric. This will cut you to pieces.

”The last eight years have really been transformative and I’ve come to re-examine many aspects of life in terms of will, happiness and family,” states Nikkolahs, who, in addition to his work as Trimmed Limbs, operates mononymously and as Inner Channel. ”The act of music-making is meditative, and in many ways it’s about putting out into the world what you strive to have reflected back.
AA”Everything is written at the same time, and it’s a process of sorting and filing later as to which bracket the material belongs in to be honest. I’d say Trimmed Limbs has a bit more aggressiveness or edge that’s tapping into a particular part of my musical upbringing. [I’m] always working on new material, and it’s just a matter of letting the work find its way to completion. I’m just the intermediary in the process of it really. There’s a lot of cross-pollination between projects in terms of instrumentation, mixing techniques and overall intent but I think each name manifests its own ecosystem.”

Fascinated predominantly by Japanther’s South of Northport EP that initiated the project and influenced lyrcially by writers such as Jeffrey Kripal, Kenneth Grant and Diana Pasulka, the collapsing ecosystem explored on A Sense Of Wonder is one teeming with a distinctly deconstructed aural quality composed of post-punk, industrial and dub sounds, filtered through a prism of warehouse soul. The ecosystem is an infestation from the abyss, populated by a bustle of twitching, cauterised mechanisms. The tracks hiss, heave and squeal. They snag and attack, and decompose. They flare up and explode into fragments, reacting against what they have been exposed to in a corrosive burst.

There’s a feral, fastidious understanding of rhythm and corrugated, cosmic grooves undulating throughout each white-hot, acid-bathed track. A palpable, infectious display of emancipation in every caustic wash and psychic glide of noise. – of letting sounds pave the pathway ahead, leading to a wilderness they have been to before, but can only get to again with Nikkolahs at the controls, enabling their role in dictating the direction of the tracks, hastily guiding him along. ”I was feeling a need for immediacy, a way to reconcile past and current expressions in keeping within artistic growth and aspirations,’’ he says of his philosophy. ”Getting ideas, riffs and patterns down quickly without much meandering for next step additions was really helpful in having songs come together and develop focus points. The balance of what’s enough or what’s lacking is always a challenge, but I’ve been embracing a “less is more” approach in most aspects of life.’’

A perfect synthesis of the those integral former and contemporary expressions Nikkolahs speaks of, specific musical heroes of his growing up, be it NIN, Ministry, Thrill Kill Kult, to more contemporary ones such Deafkids, Moor Mother, Killing Joke, whilst also appeasing ”song writing and structure paradigms that get utilized and revised over time,” A Sense Of Wonder as much as consolidates a third tangent what has been termed ”warehouse soul.’’

But again – rather than shoot for the stylistic conventions, for which there are probably many, and most of which, either overlap so much into other genres they appear more a benign itinerary of playlist-perfect, algorithmic conveniences than anything else, Nikkolahs prefer to infer their potency as whole worldviews through which – people’s lives are shaped. ”Warehouse soul has been a state of mind within factions of the Diskotopia catalogue for some time now,” he explains. ”I think it’s more of a feeling than a specific sound – something that can exist in both a physical and liminal space at once.”

The transition from those ”old expression” groups, alight and reconcile with a curiosity to represent a variant of post punk structural assembly, colliding layers and spillages of industrial timbre, and dub cut up techniques has reached it’s terminus. This isn’t to suggest some kind of creative finality, far from it (there’s a second NIIKKOLAHS EP lined up for release, with more Trimmed Limbs and Inner Channel follow-up EPs ready to be unleashed too), but it’s to suggest that so much has been gained, so much given, and by extension of the spiritual undercurrent running throughout the veins of each of Nikkolahs’ releases, an insatiable urge to express whatever is required, always remains the optimal, insatiable influence. There’s always more work to do, or stiffen like relics in a sauna of their own platitudes.
”I first started playing music in 1995 but nothing really serious took hold for me personally until 2017,” Nikkolahs explains. ”It was a lot of years of studying, listening and reconciling various influences into ways to really express myself where I could feel some satisfaction with what was being recorded was a true reflection of intent. As far as influences go it’s a constantly evolving spiral on an unconscious level – I try not to focus too much on any particular subset of influence and just let things gel naturally into whatever it is that comes out in the writing process.”

Similar to the way techno or dub producers flip their identities all on different albums and on different labels, Nikkolahs sees this shapeshifting as a method of deliberately blurring identities, whilst also providing him with a suitable, even unconscious excuse to indulge in whatever experiments he so pleases when the next project arises. There was Modes, his Diskotopia debut as NIIKKOLAHS, which utilises ”psychic(al) incursions’’ to recreate ”the cycles of creation in nature – evolution and rebirth on both micro and macro scales.’’

Additionally, Culture On Wind as Inner Channel tapped into topics regarding ”intrinsic creativity and universal connectivity” whilst being inspired by the noosphere, ”the collective intelligence and super-consciousness that envelops the Earth.” But the notion of a globally connected mental activity smothering the planet wasn’t strictly isolated to this release – those threads of ”various heremetical and meditative practices” that ”allow one to access this field and draw information, inspiration and insight,” whilst also taking in ”the outer realms beyond a materialist and secular worldview” have and will always be a boundless reserve of inspiration, nourishment and guidance for Nikkolahs and unavoidably articulated on his albums and their sculptured, sonic domains.

A Sense Of Wonder, although not a preplanned conclusion to the triptych, fits into this spiritual, as much as sonic mode perfectly – a harmonising of distinctly idiosyncratic elements, disparate yet familiar personalities in various stages of transience, discovery, growth and depletion, only to be awoken later, found asleep on the platforms of the worlds Nikkolahs is the architect of.
AA”Definitely, I resonate with the concept of blurring identities and reflecting different sides of music making. I feel like within various monikers you have room to push boundaries and explore in different ways,” he says. ”Also, when writing, I’m not setting out from the get-go to differentiate or distinguish between projects in a sense that I intentionally make this or that style knowing where it’s going to end up. It really is a case of letting the initial idea grow into what it needs to be.”

Wielding flames of searing guitars melt their way through a surface of steel easier than they would soft tissue, Chrysalis cracks apart a scuzzy paint-peeling bass, maiming and mounting the whole into place, interlocking hypnotism into place. A naked Whac-A-Mole drum, syncopated and detecting death nearby, draws blood in the centre of a circle – increasingly feverish and wild upon each roll. A procession of ketamine-reptiles cast against its crumbling, cuboid edifice appears disjointed like a jerking brigade of silhouettes.
Frenetic and agitated, Onyx hatches a nasty batch of bastardised bleep techno manufactured directly from ganja-jammed gamma-benches of Sheffield’s Western Works. Machines of muscle wrapped in sticky rolls of stereo rubber, hypnotised by the salty heat, mangled yet still managing to move perfectly fine, lacerate the whole spectral battle into states of playful, multidimensional tactility.

In a Sense Of Wonder, as with all his works for that matter, a physicality dominates. A multisensory, multi-story tactility towering above and charging through everything like the sounds are trying to escape slabs of stone, carving themselves out of the creases. It flattens. It unfolds. It invades. It causes us to react in involuntary ways. Just take psychodramatic supernova of ear-splitting fuzz in Hydraulics, a crusty kosmische dirge of distorted bass and phantom voices hover above a bed of hot electronics and plastic covered in a growth of grotesque weeds. It creates a landscape. A view of ruins accidentally birthed, but intentionally left damaged. The reward of hands dirtied, encased in barnacles, strange angles creaking with arthritis, torn to pieces. ”At this point, 80-90% of the music I’m making is played live and arranged/edited afterwards. I definitely like to hear minor imperfections/variations through individual tracks and find happy accidents along the way. It’s tough for me to get inspired with composing without having a hands-on approach.”

Destiny Collides as a free-flowing industrial dub ritual at peak sacrifice hours. Spells of ecstatic electronics – closer to a call of sacred pipes, hand-built instruments or weapons crafted over centuries than synths are heard vibrating with intoxicating bioluminescence. They glimmer like stars shining from within a field of pulsating drums and grunts of doomy bass direct from a post-apocalyptic peat bog.
AASoon after, as though summoned up from the chipped-chrome floorboards of an ancient, underground goth club occupied by an On-U–Sound residency, Faith unfurls with a thick smog of dubwise basslines whilst the unstable clatter of industrial synths whip and whirl away. A mysterious throb flowing throughout the concealed subterranea of a city swinging as one being compels us to climb into its irresistible throng.

But it’s not just on this song alone where the dub influence creeps in. Dub is a method to make sense of chaos rather than just about heavy basslines and echoing space delay. It’s a dub-informed spiritual practice that permeates the jagged, interacting arrangements of the album. ”Absolutely. The sonics, weight and atmosphere of dub is an integral base in the foundation of everything I do, really,” Nikkolahs states. ”I think the immediacy and energy is what comes through most with Trimmed Limbs in regards to post-punk or industrial aligned structures and conventions. It’s really about tapping into the love and energy felt within those spaces, in expressing something personal through it. I like to lay down a lot of variations and takes of certain parts, then kind of cut up and abstract the best bits that work in getting the key emotions and intents across.”

The title track kicks off with heart-quickening paranoia, droning through a ghostly, holographic amphitheatre with murky, dancehall stomp. It wheezes and palpitates as a burning, celluloid dream of disembodied voices rasp back and forth like vapours creeping in through small shafts of space in the ventilation grid. A mean, flesh-mincing scourge of rickety guitars slices the intensity to pieces as though Roland S. Howard has sparked up a cigarette and, in a flight of mischievous fancy, thrown it onto the whole smouldering textural lattice. Tarmac turns to treacle. Whole cars boiled into a vapourised pile of abstract components.

Putting something into the world as a way to have it reflected back – an admixture of a few inches onwards from the threshold’s drop, whilst tempting to traverse it on the other side before the leap – A Sense Of Wonder puts in plenty.

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Ryan Walker | Louder Than War