25/06/2024
In case you missed the announcement last week via the PKD Bandcamp page, here’s the lowdown on the next release. Conditioning by Tenebrae Annex () will be out on digital and DVD-R on July 12th. Why DVD and not CD? Well, read on…
Descending upon Tenebrae Annex’s Conditioning is a journey into a late night head-trip, a thundering, pulsating soundtrack for upheaval, revolution, and chaos. The one-man project of Jason Hembree, Tenebrae Annex pulls threads from Akira Yamaoka, Nine Inch Nails, Frank Zappa, and Goblin to weave a sonic straitjacket meant to capture the listener, refusing to let go until the final flickering notes fade into black. Utilizing actual industrial and machinery samples only adds to the effect, giving the entire album a musique concrete foundation that’s both familiar and unsettling.
But this is to say nothing of the visuals accompanying the record. Created from the ground up to be a true A/V experience, each track has its own video, drawing the audience further into the vision of Conditioning. Inspired by experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage, along with visionaries like John Carpenter, David Lynch, and David Cronenberg, the video segments feel beamed in from an alternate reality, where one’s subconscious is played on a loop in a midnight theater. Glitchy, nightmarish…this is not an experience for the faint of heart. Indeed, the story the short film is telling is one of a future malevolent entity, M.Coda Industries, hellbent on genetic and cross-species experimentation. The footage might be taken from closed-circuit signals within MCI, used in brainwashing their human and animal subjects.
Is this a future we’re already creating? Or is it possible to avoid through care and collective course-correction? Time will only tell, but Tenebrae Annex provides us with one possible outcome.
Gaze into the abyss with us, won’t you?