digipak. First utterance ‘The Sublime’ is a world of interlocking miniatures, music in which a familiar centre has collapsed and been restructured into new forms, where ghosts are created by absence. The project’s name speaks of an incalculable vastness of contemplation within: YER??ELEM’s sound is a congruent melding of powerfully bass-heavy Godfleshian clank and grind, the sacred ur-texts of Coil and Autechre, stark neo-gothic guitar leads with intimations of fusion, the freshness-into-fetid-air experimentation of back-end ‘90s Mayhem and Thorns, post-punk urbanity, psychedelic dreamgaze, subterranean industrial pulses and the crunching rhythmic crispness of modernist electronica. Eternal searching has culminated in a new vocal and lyrical clarity which moves further towards communication than anything previously recorded by the pair. Is this spiritualism or lack thereof? Prayer or anti-prayer? Self-renewal from without or within? With ‘The Sublime’ YER??ELEM have created a realm unreal and all too real, the definition truly undefined - the source as unfathomable as it ever was.
