CD-R, Cold Graey, 2007
www.myspace.com/indumezu
Surreal stuff, this Indu Mezu. Listening to “Chdetoria” is an immersive experience – the brain shuts down, filtering out all extraneous influences and leaving you floating inside the grimy universe of this Russian artist’s creation. While there, you may expect to encounter disembodied whispers (like ghostly electronic voice phenomena, exhorting you to all kinds of unspeakable action) floating through heavily textured alien atmospheres while a barrage of unexpected noise glitches bombards you. Then, as the last bars of “Rust95 – In Memoriam” fade out, you slowly return to reality, wondering if it was all a dream…
But nothing that anticlimactic, or clichéd, should ever be associated with this album. It’s an intricate construction of tape loops, synthesized sounds and computers, computers, computers; which, while being thoroughly accessible, leaves a deep impression that may take some time to surface. Only during my third listen did I really start paying attention, rather than just letting the music carry me on its drifting tides of reverberating static bursts.
Whether you term Indu Mezu industrial (previous releases, like “Opus,” deliver late-70s-esque metal-on-metal machine hymns a-plenty), experimental, glitch or ambient, you’ll be somewhat off the mark: on “Chdetoria,” labels are transcended and what is left is something more akin to an autobiographical soundtrack, constantly changing and evolving, as does the listener. In this way listening to Indu Mezu can become an experience bordering on the spiritual (in much the same way that repeated reading of the Tao Te Ching can provide innumerable insights into the nature of the universe) – which in turn inspires me to term this album as a “quantum-ambient” release – something that is altered in a very personal way by the very act of observation, like light’s dual wave/particle nature.
Chilling, absorbing and very inspirational, “Chdetoria” is one of the more engaging albums I have had the pleasure of listening to in a long time.
[8.5/10]
— David vander Merwe