Some of the most engaging experiments in the world begin as accidents. For experimental artist David Brenner, known for his work with boundary pushers like Theologian, taking a series of accidents and stringing them together into something cohesive seems to be the sole guiding rule. The songs on the debut album from his new solo project, Gridfailure, were culled from a series of previously abandoned recording sessions and reworked into something entirely new and hideous. Between the months of February and April, Brenner conducted the sonic experiments that would become Ensuring the Bloodline Ends Here. With unrelated tracks layered over each other, skeletal compositions take horrifying shape and become dense nightmares of warped instruments, disintegrating static, and shifting tones that more closely resemble howling wind than actual music.In noise and industrial music, unrestrained aggression and force are common. On Ensuring the Bloodline Ends Here, there is a deliberate sense of being grounded in the middle of the horror. From the brief, crumbling percussion of the title track to the nearly nine minutes of cut up sound of “Welcoming Pyroclastic Eradication,” the album displays great variety without feeling like a collection of loose ends. Utilizing everything from decaying electronics to violins and harmonica, Gridfailure manages to fuse the familiar and the foreign in a way that is more likely to cause listeners to clench their jaw than to nod their heads. In resisting the urge to turn every knob to 11 and bludgeon the audience into aural submission, Gridfailure has conjured up something that is both unpredictable and unnerving.The Compound is releasing Ensuring the Bloodline Ends Here on May 13 on CD and as a digital album, but you can begin your descent into paranoia immediately by getting lost in our full album stream below.
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