Review:REVISIO: Unearth Noise | The Dream Of Life

Unearth Noise, an ever-evolving project by New Jersey based Roger Berkowitz has always been hard to pin down. A stew of sounds that make you feel like you are a long way from home, spiked by psychoactive weirdness, deep in some desert or forest. A snaking mental and physical journey that’s reminiscent of loads of things, but somehow unlike any of them.

We’ve enjoyed his previous albums, particularly the heat-stroked zones of and the And Light Beams Will Guide The Way (a collaboration with Dreamspeak), the spidery ambience of Celestial Devices, and the ominous moody shadows of Envisioning.

The Dream Of Life is another subtle shift in gears where Berkowitz takes percussion, infinity harp, guitar, sitar, flute, voice and electronics (alongside Henry Koek – Saxophone and Gautam Karnik – Violin) and zones in on the overlaps between these separate sound generators. Each track takes two or three instruments and knits them together into textured swatches of sound. 12 tracks that all feel like candle lit late night improvisations, that deliberately limit themselves to construct very specific atmospheres.

The opener Mirror locks into a pattern that suggests a paddle through some ancient water way. The whole piece filled with a tumbling off centre groove around a droning centre, pecked at by odd glitches. Earthen vessels is a dusty dawn on some city not on any map. Tribe of tears twinkling like a charm blowing in the hot air before a voice, cycling in an unknown language anoints us. Palette of wisdom is feverish drones and steel drum reflections.

The whole thing drifts by, in true Berkowitz fashion, like the opening tracks are buffers between the world before you hit play here. A portal to travel through, the change of gears to acclimatise you into this new realm. Portraits looms in like the first sense of any real destination. A beautiful cascading sax reminiscent of Harold Budd’s sublime Bismillahi ‘Rrahman ‘Rrahim married to chiming Laraaji vibes.

How did we find ourselves here? is even more pronounced, a heady flute miasma, like the finest vintage Kraftwerk, as buzzing elements lock into engrossingly odd mathematical sequences. Nighshapes is like some odd agitated and mechanised windchime, punctuated with guitar, whilst What if I were to just disappear? tumbles in infinite thumb piano and spectral funk.
By this point deep into the album, To the light they return feels different again as geometric electronic oily pulses and voices rise through smoke filled air. Unveiling the nature within is more textural oddness, but, yet again the rug eventually gets pulled from under you, as multitracked drum rolls and angular sax scribbles over everything. The effect pulls you in different directions, the wildest, yet somehow most earth based and familiar, the album gets. Vessel of dreams draws the whole thing to a close with little more than a standing wave of percussion and distant droning horns…

The weird strengths of this album is the way it manages to rise and fade in your awareness. Several times, we’ve simply lost track of what’s even playing, or that we were even playing anything. Far from a failure to hold the listener’s attention, it feels that Berkowitz understands the vital lesson that adventurous albums like this truly do need to be full of light and shade. Albums like this can’t just be a succession of crescendos.

Like all of Unearth Noise music, The Dream Of Life has a very real quality, that richly opens up over time. It’s an album to live with, to be intoxicated by, and baffled by…

-Obladada John, October13, 2023