Due to the fact
Dirk Serries recorded his first new material as Fear Falls Burning five years ago and because I'm a huge fan of him, I've decided not to write about one particular album (which would be problematic to choose one, as I almost admire all of them) but instead, I want to give an overview of the man's musical output of the past five years.
Some information
I'm sure you'll be able to dig up enough information on the net about his two most known projects being
Vidna Obmana and
Fear Falls Burning. To summarize, you need to know that Serries started his musical career in the glorious tape area of the mid eighties. Being a big fan of
Maurizio Bianchi, Vidna Obmana was all about industrial noise in the beginning. Later on, this shifted towards ambient with lots of influences coming from contemporary and tribal instruments like didgeridoo, djembe, shaker, rainsticks, Tibetan bells, windshells and so on and so on ... After twenty years, Dirk Serries decided to go back to the point where it all began, the core of the music, the stripped-down version of his loop-based music. He (re)discovered his love for noise and made not only a musical but also a mental change. A tabula rasa if you like. He left his electronic equipment untouched and got himself a famous Les Paul guitar, a bunch of pedals and guitar-sound-manipulating devices and started to produce guitar based drones. However, if you listen carefully you'll notice that fundamentally the music of both Vidna Obmana and Fear Falls Burning is constructed on the same foundation. That of endlessly repeated loops that are build on top of one another to construct a multi-layered sound spectrum in which the listener can escape from reality. OK, enough about that pseudo-intellectual socio-psychological study, let's dive into the discography of Fear Falls Burning.
Fear Falls Burning - the discography
The first release was the self-released "First by a whisper, than by a storm - tour CD", packaged in a slimline DVD case, that came out in early 2005. This was an enormous risk Serries took. After all, his Vidna Obmana project was relatively known in the industrial/ambient scene, but this first Fear Falls Burning release contained no link at all to this - at that time - better known project. He could have used the name TAFKAVO, but he didn't. This was a radically new beginning and as such, Dirk had to start all over again from scratch. Starting to play in small venues, for an audience of 20 to 30 people, of which 50% probably was part of the organization and the other half was more interested in the half naked chick behind the bar than that one-man band that was playing on an (improvised) stage. This CD act as some sort of promo material that showed what music Fear Falls Burning produced. It contains various excerpts of the first "official" album yet to come, and we hear an artist that is still searching what to do exactly, going for a minimal ambient approach or going the hard noise-drone based way.
The first official release came out in 2005 on
Projekt (on which Vidna Obmana released some albums as well) and was entitled "He Spoke In Dead Tongues". This was - again - a risk (a commercial suicide if you ask me) due to the fact that it was immediately a double CD. I don't know about you, but I already find it difficult to listen to a full CD in one time (hence my love for vinyl - thank God for the pause between side A and side B), let alone two discs! At that time, Dirk was still releasing albums under his Vidna Obmana moniker. This double CD contains variations on minimalistic loop-based themes and as such can be classified under the ambient flag although one song is clearly reveling what FFB is about to become: a magnificent guitar-based drone band.
2005 brought the double 7" release on
Die Stad by Z'EV, John duncan, Aiden Baker and Fear Falls Burning. Altough it's a nice release, it doesn't really add anything to the Fear Falls Burning discography if you take a look at it at the present time. At the time it was released it was the first time Fear Falls Burning really was determined to follow the path of guitar-based drones.
2006 is the year the Fear Falls Burning rocket really took off at full speed. First release was this amazing 12" entitled "The Carnival Of Ourselves" released on
Tonefloat records. This is until today one of my two favorite FFB releases. This release is a pure and minimal piece of almost melancholic ambient music and it's created based on such a simple principle of loops of sounds ... needless to say this record is the one you should get your hands on if you're into infinite repeating minimal sounds and themes. It even vaguely reminds me a bit of the work of Phill Niblock. At some point, Dirk Serries will continue this style on his microphonics release - music he will release under his own name, I'll inform you about that later. Anyway, this 12" is released in 300 copies of which the first 100 were on black vinyl, the next 100 on clear vinyl and the last 100 are sold in a separate 5XLP box released on Tonefloat.
Together with (or maybe before, I really can't tell which one came first) "The Carnival Of Ourselves", Fear Falls Burning released another 12" on
Tonefloat records entitled "The Drone Amplifier", pressed on white vinyl in a limited edition of 500 copies. As the title suggests, this release is the complete opposite of the previous one as it goes entirely into the domain of noisy drones and slices of controlled feedback. It is - well for me it is - the first release that clearly indicates that path Fear Falls Burning will follow on the next releases: the path of guitar-based drones, built using loops on top of loops of long stretched out echo-sounding guitar drones. It is also - as far as I know - the album with the shortest tracks on it, meaning you have more than one song per side. On this release, Dirk gets help from Paul Van Den Berg (who is also part - together with Dirk Serries - of
3 Seconds Of Air).
This is the only record I can't tell anything about, for the very simple reason I don't own this one (the only one missing from my FFB collection ... so if anyone out there wants to get rid off it, gimme a yell!). Anyway, "We Have Departed The Circle Blissfully" is a a release Fear Falls Burning realized together with
Nadja on
Conspiracy Records. Later, Fear Falls Burning will release a second album together with Nadja on the same label. Now I have to be honest, I'm not a fan of Nadja (or Aidan Baker). For some reason their sound just doesn't do anything for me. So I'm not sure I will like this album but for the sake of completing my FFB collection I'm still looking for this one ... even it was released in a limited edition of 250 copies.
Between "We Have Departed The Circle Blissfully" and this one, Fear Falls Burning also released a DVD entitled "The Infinite Sea Of Sustain" (released on
Soleilmoon Recordings). But since I'm not much of a DVD fan, I'm not going to talk about that one. Much more interesting is this "I'm One Of Those Numbers Numb With Grace" released on
Equation records. Next to "The Carnival Of Ourselves" this is my other favorite FFB release. Released in a limited edition of 399 copies (the first 50 on gold vinyl, the rest on gray vinyl) this one is a truly amazing piece of hallucinating guitar-drones. The way Serries uses his guitar, loopback devices and other electronics on this album is astonishing! If you ever wanted to get yourself a record that sumarizes all you need to know about loop-based guitar-driven drone music that creates an almost psychedelic experience than this is the one you need to get. Highly recommended!
A 7" seems a format that's a bit awkward for the work of fear falls burning. After all, we're not talking music by The Ramones here. Instead, this music takes a rather long time before it's able to reach to the point where it wants to be, so one needs a format that's capable in offering a long duration, which is either a CD or a 12" record. Anyway, this 7" contains two excerpts of a concert Fear Falls Burning did at Extrapool, Nijmegen (The Netherlands) on October 7th, 2006. Although the music on this 7" is very great, this release on
Tonefloat records doesn't really add anything to the Fear Falls Burning repertoire. It was released as a limited edition of 500 copies, pressed on clear vinyl.
Next one is this LP released on the German label
Auf Abwegen (pressed on only 300 copies) and just like the previous 7", it contains a live-set, recorded at the Kulturbunker Mülheim in Köln (Germany). But unlike the previous 7", this LP can be considered as an album because it contains coherent numbers. Side B contains the most hallucinating piece of Fear Falls Burning guitar-driven drones until that moment. It starts as a relatively intimate loop-generated texture, but halfway the song some creepy echoing drone comes in and sets direction towards a dark and scary atmosphere. This way of working was first tested on "I'm One Of Those Numbers Numb With Grace" and is repeated on this album, but in a slightly different approach. Needless to say this is a great album.
The last release of 2006 is this amazing picture disc on the Italian
A Silent Place. This 10" (the ultimate vinyl format if you ask me) shows us the most "metal" side of Fear Falls Burning. No longer stretched-out echoing sheets of loop-based drones but firm and massive almost-metal-like riffs. I say "almost" because you should not consider this release as a pure metal-album, but if I have to position it somewhere on the FFB matrix, it would go into the metal-section. Quiet different than the previous material but again something that adds to the overall fear falls burning sound which know covers a relatively vast territory from minimal ambient loops via guitar drones to almost metal-like riffs.
2007 is the year of the collaborations for Fear Falls Burning. The first one is this second collaboration with
Nadja with a CD-release on the Belgian
conspiracy records in a limited edition of 1000 copies. As said earlier in this post, I'm not a big fan of Nadja. I've no idea why, but the sound they produce just doesn't appeal to me. I only have Bodycage on double LP and although everyone seems to worship this album I only find it average. It's not bad, but it isn't exactly what I would classify as a brilliant album. Anyway, we're talking about Fear Falls Burning here and this release in particular. I've a bit mixed feelings about this one. I think in terms of a "commercial success" it will score relatively high. And I don't mean in sales figures or anything like it, but more in terms of making your artist name or project known to a broader audience. I think Fear Falls Burning achieved that goal with this album. The album itself certainly isn't bad. It contains some pretty sophisticated parts where the produced drones make a solid bridge to jump from one part of the album to another part. So as a starter I think it's a very good album. But for me personally it's no my favorite album.
The next Fear Falls Burning release is a real stunt, a challenge, a statement and a clear indication that in less than 2 years FFB evolved from a relatively obscure one-man band to a well-established name in the world of drone music. This five-double LP (released on
Tonefloat records in a limited edition of 500 copies, all discs pressed on clear vinyl) contains 10 songs FFB created in collaboration with 10 different artists. The name of the contributing artists will speak for itself. In order of appearance they are
Bass Communion (the drone-project of Porcupine Tree frontman Steven Wilson),
Final (Justin Broadrick's longest living ambient project),
Freiband (Frans de Waard), Harvestman (
Steve Von Till), Birchville Cat Motel (Campbell Kneale),
Byla (side project of two Dysrhytmia members),
Aidan Baker, Johannes Persson (
Cult of Lana), Jefre Cantu-Ledesma (
Tarentel) and
Stefano Pilia (3/4HadBeenEliminated). Needless to say the result is very varied, from regular drones to rather abstract and minimal "electronics" to firm metal-based riffs. Everything is present on this prestigious release.
Next release again is a collaboration and again it's released on
conspiracy records. This time, Serries partner in crime is Campell Kneale's most known project Birchville Cat Motel (or BCM in short). BCM is known for producing long stretched out free music drones that get pretty intense. If you don't know anything about this project, I can highly recommend the triple CD "Curved Surface Destroyer", released in 2006 on
Last Visible Dog). As far as this release goes, this one probably is the most "difficult" one to listen to. There's only one track on this CD and it lasts almost 50 minutes. But it's quiet unbelievable what happens in those 50 minutes. This is pretty intense stuff and adds yet another aspect to the overall sound spectrum of Fear Falls Burning. If you're into intense free psych noise music than you're pretty save with this release. Personally I think the number on this CD is a bit too long. After all, 50 minutes is a long time to focus, but if you're willing to do an effort you will have a very pleasant journey ... it's just not going to be a relaxing one ...
So far for the collaboration releases in 2007. At the end of the year, Dirk found at FFB headquarters a stock of CD's from the very first self-released "First By A Storm, Than By A Storm - tour CD". 136 to be precisely. A new idea was born. This CD was repackaged again to be released on
Tonefloat records (in a rather obvious limited edition of 136 copies). The beauty of this release, officially entitled "First By A Storm, Than By A Storm - Special Edition" is that it comes with an LP containing 4 songs Serries recorded in 2004, so at the very first beginning of his new project. It's unbelievable that we had to wait 3 years in order to hear this! On these 4 songs the drones are not yet omni-present, but instead I hear the echoes of good people such as Oren Ambarchi, Loren Mazzacane Conners and even some Roy Montgommery or Jim O'Rourke. Mind you, these 4 tracks already show Dirk's unique playing and these mentioned artists should not be taken too literally as I only mention them to have some sort of reference (not that this should be needed anway). It's amazing to hear how 4 simple, minimal and modest songs can lead to such a beauty.
The last album of 2007 was again released on
Tonefloat records, limited on 500 copies. This release again has one song per side and after the 3 last feedback driven noise/drone releases (the Nadja and BCM collaborations, plus the 5XLP set), this time we find Fear Falls Burning at the other side of the drone spectrum: the side of minimal, almost ambient music. People who're familiar with the likes of Stars Of The Lid or Windy & Carl might try this "When Mystery Prevades The Well, Promise Sets Fire" out. It's an album where silence and space play a role in revealing the sound Fear Falls Burning produces this time. So it's just a matter of listening to this on the right time and in the most optimal conditions, meaning late night, dark room with nothing but a candle light, a good single malt, your ears buried deep in a decent Sennheiser and your mind set to an absolute minimum of working (I don't want you to stop breathing all of a sudden, some vital functions should keep on working). The only thing you should focus on is listening to the beauty of this minimal and quiet drone album.
In 2008, Fear Falls Burning uses his experience from his European tour on this album. While on the road with and playing together with other bands, Dirk Serries played together with some other musicians live on stage. They all were so satisfied with the result, that Serries invited them to help him out on his next record "Frenzy Of The Absolute" (released on
conspiracy records as a double LP, limited edition of 500 copies of which 150 on clear white vinyl and 350 on black vinyl. Also released on CD). This album is probably his most "rock"-oriented album yet as it contains real drummers and all that. The people involved in helping to make this album were Johannes Persson and Magnus Lindberg (both from Cult Of Luna), Tim Bertilsson (Switchblade) and Dave Vanderplas (Llips and ex-Ontayso). Mind you that the best track is the last track which unfortunately doesn't appear on the CD version ... so get yourself a copy of this great album on vinyl.
In September 2008, Fear Falls Burning and Bass Communion (the drone-project of Porcupine Tree frontman Steven Wilson) performed live on stage in Antwerp (Belgium). All visitors of that show received this fine 7" (released on
Tonefloat records) that contains a song by each group. A nice little item that contains two nice songs by two nice bands. In fact, when listening to this the first time I was a bit surprised by the FFB track on this single, until I discovered later that I was listening to the Bass Communion side. And the fact you need to play this on 33RPM instead of 45RPM (as printed on the vinyl) certainly adds to appreciate these two songs as well ...
In 2009 we only saw one new Fear Falls Burning album showing up and it's again a collaboration. This time, Serries plays together with
Theo Travis, who is currently employed by the über space/psych/mushroom-eating band Gong. I must say I'm very intrigued by this one and for me, it's one of FFB's best albums. It has a very strange and haunting atmosphere but it's so strict and minimal that you're afraid to breath while listening. You might have missed one single tone or note that was played at the moment you took a deep breath. For me this is FFB's best collaboration album yet. Both Travis and Serries control their instruments as perfectionists and are capable in creating an extraordinary sound that's based on both guitar-drones and flute-based loops. It has a tight texture and results in a rather dark and unearthly atmosphere. An amazing album this one and what's more, it's the only album that keeps secrets for me, that I'm sure of. Everytime I listen to these "Tonefloat Sessions" I find myself on another path in this mysterious world, shaped by Theo Travis on flute and Dirk Serries on guitar (and electronic devices). This album was released on
Tonefloat records in a limited edition of 600 copies, of which 200 copies are pressed on blue vinyl.
Reissues
In 2009, Dirk has decided to reissue some (or all?) of his long out-of-print vinyl releases. To keep the vinyl legacy untouched, this is going to be a reissue on CD on
Tonefloat records. So if you missed some releases, this is your change in discovering the unique music of Fear Falls Burning. For the die-hard fans amongst you, the reissues of the vinyl are all remastered for CD and contain a bonus track (which in some cases can be a track of 30 minutes if not longer!). And is it to do me a favor or is it just a coincidence that the first two reissues are my two favorite FFB albums, being "The Carnival Of Ourselves" and "I'm One Of Those Numbers Numb With Grace"?
Microphonics
Dirk Serries is busy man. Not only is he making music under the Fear Falls Burning moniker, he's also involved in remix projects, active as a (vinyl) mastering engineer and helps out fellow musicians by playing on (part of) their album. Next to Fear Falls Burning, Dirk Serries is also active in
3 Seconds Of Air (of which there were already two posts on this blog), released an album as
The Eightfold Model (a collaboration with
KPT.Michi.Gan) in 2008 on
Tonefloat records and he just released an album entitled "Anthems" as The Black Fire (which is a project of Dirk Serries and Robert MacManus, known from
Grey Datures) which was released on
Heathen Skulls.
But I'd like to draw your attention to the albums Dirk started to release under his own name. As of 2008, Serries felt the time has came to start releasing music under his own name. After making music for more than 25 years and going through many musical shifts and changes (noise, industrial, ambient, tribal, drone, minimal, ...) it's about time that the world knows that there's someone with a real name behind all this beautiful music. His name is Dirk Serries and his work released under his own name is what he calls
microphonics.
The first release is entitled "Microphonics I-V" and contains 4 songs (II, III, IV and V ... maybe song I will end up as bonus track someday, who knows). Anyway, microphonics is in a way less "angry" and "dark" than Fear Falls Burning. The music is built on a soft and warm texture and is the ideal platform for the minimal and almost ambient like gentle guitar drones. I told in the very beginning of this post that the music on "The Carnival Of Ourselves" would be continued on Dirk's microphonics project. A very enjoyable release, that's for sure. Released on
Tonefloat records in a limited edition of 500 copies of which 150 copies are pressed on crystal white vinyl.
"Microphonics VI" (released in 2008) and "Microphonics VII" (released in 2009) both are a single-sided LP and contain a live recording. These live-recordings capture Dirk at his most intimate moments and could almost be seen as "Serries goes unplugged". All two of them were released on
Tonefloatrecords in a limited edition of 300 copies, 100 pressed on white, 100 pressed on grey and 100 pressed on gold vinyl.
Preferred Drink: Duvel, Talisker
Goh Lee Kwang is a Malaysian sound artist. He has created sound installations and visual (video) installations and has done electro-acoustic improvisation performances as well as composing music for radio broadcasts and soundtracks for theater and movies.
