When British record label Blackest Ever Black started their journey in 2010, it began with a duo called
Raime. Their eponymous 12" was BEB's first-ever release; the sounds of '70s industrial steel and pounding, somber breakbeats heard on Raime EP seemed to epitomize the label's aesthetic, and the record is probably the label's most enduring and enigmatic calling card. Their modern industrial sounds reference various periods of timeless underground British music, and from the bleak Sheffield mechanics of
Cabaret Voltaire to the shadowy '90s drum'n'bass of
Source Direct, there is a definite and distinct darkness about
Raime.
Quarter Turns Over a Living Line is the group's fine and uneasy full-length debut. The opener, "Passed Over Trail," sinisterly sets the tone, the drone effects and distorted cello creating perfect anxiety. The post-apocalyptic "Soils and Colts" is a pummeling and subtly aggressive track that slightly recalls the gloomy post-punk of
Death in June.
Raime differ from their musical peers by recording with live instruments -- not dissimilar to
the Haxan Cloak -- rather than relying on the clinical generic sound created solely on laptops, and the depth and breadth of this organic sound can be clearly heard throughout the record. The horror-flecked wails and kinetic cowbells of "The Walker in Blast and Bottle" serve as a superb primer for the album's standout track, "Your Cast Will Tire." A crushing procession, the song's ritual blend of guitar snippets and samples and reverberated cello collapse around you, which will leave the feeling of either suffocation or freedom. The seven tracks on this album weave their way through the subconsciousness and demand to be re-heard time and time again. There is an air of deliverance on this record, a haunting malevolence. It is the sound of shadows lurking, the sound of a thousand crashing cars, the sound of flesh ripping on steel. It is the sound of
Raime. ~ Aneet Nijjar