Purgate - Transcend (2024)

Frederic Arbours musical output over the last twenty five years has been one of consistent, dark eyed focus. His project Visions and the collaborative Skorneg has issued abyssal dark ambient and textured minimal drones respectively. Further, the output of Stärker, his duo with Martin Dumais, published isolating industrial techno on Hospital Productions and Zhark, notable amidst a sea of clones for their conviction in utterly colourless productions, the sound of factories producing for a customer long since dead. Purgate feels like a conglomeration of this previous work with eyes set outward and upwards, space gazing instead of bowed toward the iron ball beneath all of our feet.

Opener ‘Starlight’ rubs its eyes open to a freezing morning shuffle. Pulsing effects bleating a line drawn through snow while hats wrinkle around the globular mass of the centre. Its dubbed heart obscured in a cloud of acrid smoke. ‘Solar Flare’ is a reverberant chorus of chirping metal delay lines entwined around a thick techno throb, a smokescreen of detail ready to disrupt anyones passage through the club.

Things get more discordant and drawn away from the slope with ‘Dawn’. Again a motif of birdsong and animalia are chromed out and burnished at the polish. A vertigo music for the 3am swap out. ‘Mist’ offers a light touch, a clearing in the sky where the perfect black backdrop can be better felt, each repetition puncturing and punctuating a profound minimalism. We close, of course, with ‘Closure’, the weight repositioned into a rich sub burrowing. Wood and metal sound against one another as the sky touches the earth.