Listening to Paul Chain Violet Theater’s “In the Darkness” record, I always digged the song “War”, the mesmerising ambient track cleverly thrown in between the heavy riffage to increase atmosphere. Well, it turns out there’s an entire album of those songs, Violet Art of Improvisation! And what an album it is, penetrating your unsuspecting brain and staying there for a hundred minutes, turning knobs and flipping tables.
The album is not very consistent with varying production quality from song to song, but is tied together by the collective hypnotic weirdness that is definitely the main trait of Violet Art. The thumping repetition of the 31-minute opener “Tetri Teschi in Luce Viola” sets the standard for this. Paul and company fill it’s hefty running time with guitars, organs, synths going ape shit, vocal samples of what sounds like some sermon held in Italian and whatever else. It is easy to feel like you’re going a bit crazy toward the end, which I guess is the goal with a song/album like this.
“X Ray” is another lengthy track, however a rocker, with excellent bass playing and energetic drums accompanying Paul’s psychedelic guitar work. Fans of lo-fi space/kraut rock (German Oak, San Francisco’s Shiver) will enjoy this song. Most of the other tracks are gloomy, at times organ-fueled electronic meditations, with “Casual Two Your Mister” being the most disturbing slice, a proper soundtrack to psychosis or a bad, bad, looping LSD-trip. “Dedicated to Jesus” on the other hand is a pure 80s electronic John Carpenter-theme that sees Chain exhibiting a rather awful vocal style that thankfully makes an appearance only on this one track.
While it is weird and long, Violet Art of Improvisation is generally a joy to sit through. The doom of Paul Chain’s Violet Theatre is definitely there, executed in an even more psychedelic, and clearly more electronic and repetitive fashion than something like “Detaching From Satan”. It’s a crazy ride of atmospheric experimentation worth looking into!
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