ARUM LILIES: Subsurface Aquifers

Release year: 2023
Label: Death Continues Records

From the very onset, there’s something delightfully warped and just ever so slightly twisted about Australian Arum Lilies’ second album Subsurface Aquifers. From the covers and packaging to the music itself, it’s all a bit off in a way that’s vaguely disconcerting. And it makes the album intriguing.

Painting with broad strokes, it’s easy to pigeonhole Arum Lilies. Industrial of the noisier kind, check. But going beyond that… well, things get trickier and Subsurface Aquifers becomes harder to pin down. Which adds to the intrigue.

Discogs, for example, labels Arum Lilies power electronics. And, for sure, there are moments here that are power electronics. And stuff that could be described as noise. And I wouldn’t object if you said of one or the other section that it sounds a lot like death industrial. But on the whole, none of those descriptors apply to the album as a whole.

You see, whilst there are outbursts of vicious noise and unsettling layers of feedback, grinding drones and white noise, there are also plenty of warbling sections of hackneyed, distorted pseudomelodies and understated, even minimalist atmospherics. Dark ambient!, I hear you call out. Well… no. Except to the extent that yes, I do think fans of dark ambient will also find stuff here that suits their palate.

The genius in Subsurface Aquifers is in how these two work together. Blasting noise melts into a limping melody that sounds like a distorted, broken tape. Beneath a (possbily sampled) melody, layers of subtle electronic noise add a subliminal feeling of unease. The noise subtly grows, only to blast into a satisfying but brief climax at the very end. Over this interplay between chaos and broken order, edited and manipulated speech samples are overlaid, only strengthening the alien feel of the music.

I’m loath to use words such as apocalyptic or cataclysmic in regard to this album, but undeniably there’s a strong feel of this album being post-something. Post some fall. Not the end of the world as a glorious explosion, but rather as an afterthought; a banal event, which most don’t realize has taken place. But slowly things start to go slightly left, just a bit wrong; and as the unnerving offness increases little by little, people start to realize. It’s not quite melancholic, either… more like world weary, like a long held in sigh that’s finally released, if that makes sense. That’s the kind of end of the world feeling that permeates Subsurface Aquifers.

The most perfect embodiment of this is The Late Great Planet Earth. A slightly pitch-shifted male voice waxes poetic about fabled yesteryear with sickening nostalgia of how things used to be better “back in the good old days” over a warbling melody that just feels off. Beneath, the menacing noise of broken down electronics lurks just at the edge of auditory perception – until it bursts to cover all like a tidal wave.

Subsurface Aquifers is a weird little album. But it’s also a rewarding one. And despite its weirdness, surprisingly easy to get into, at least as far as industrial noise goes. And that’s a positive comment. The album has a very sensible running time of just over half an hour, and despite being an eclectic combination of approaches, it’s not obtuse or unapproachable. The initial intrigue of the weird mood naturally segues into an appreciation of just how well-crafted the album is.

Arum Lilies doesn’t seem to have an online presence, but visit the label’s Facebook page