By Lee Newman
Author & Punisher is cold. It is machinery. And quite literally, Tristan Stone is the ghost in the machine. For years, he has been constructing an intricate series of mechanical instruments called Drone/Dub Machines. They don’t resemble musical traditional equipment like guitars or keyboards; instead, they’re more like factory line robots or medical equipment. From within them, Stone spins haunting industrial doom. He doesn’t play his inventions so much as interface with them, their components reaching out align with his hands, his feet, and to wrap around his face. His machines encase him. Author & Punisher is an exercise in precision, man and machine together. It is the marriage of robotic intensity and intense vulnerability. Biomechanical.
For something so inorganic, Women & Children begins with the calm of nature: crickets chirping. Then, over it, artificial heartbeats, bass drum hits begin to drop two by two, and a low wash of foreboding synth noise boots up. Warped cries, the human element, eventually join the fray, along with fuzzy, violent progressions that defy the term “riff” but provide the same melodic payoff. The vocals here come close to being clean, but there is always a gasp of something robotic layered over them, a thrum or echo. Once the noise of the crickets fades away, we are left in a veritable iron lung. We get lost in the machinery.
This machine primes itself as it goes, growing in intensity as the album continues. When Stone’s beats land – and they do, hard, on crushing tracks like “Fearce” – they are a knee between your shoulder blades as you lie prone, crushing you into the concrete. However, they can also be a gentle, cold wash, like two icy fingers probing for your pulse, on “Miles From Home”. Precision is key here. A track will end abruptly like someone’s pull the plug on it and cut off its power. Every beat lands perfectly, or a ripping transition will explode from nothing like on “Women & Children”. Lurid, jarring progressions like the beginning of “In Remorse”, with its off-key, melting synth buzz, condition you to become comfortable within Author & Punisher’s military industrial complex. You learn to prefer control over chaos.Lyrically, there is something raw and instinctual straining at the bit, a primal crux within the brutalist grip. The emotional core of this album centers around cleansing through punishment. Stone’s cries of “I can’t restrain myself” on album cornerstone “Pain Myself” lament a lack of self-discipline (a theme also echoed in the morose “Tame as a Lion”). The themes of submission here echo NIN, and indeed, Women & Children at times references Reznor’s one-fingered piano progressions. “Fasten me down,” Stone pleads, so he can “force the toxins out.”
Women & Children is a tough listen, but an immensely clever one. Stone’s sentient machine prompts you to confront some of the uglier parts of yourself. Its steely pulse will definitely leave you feeling cold, like your face has been drained of blood, long after it has powered down. Check it out in full over at Earsplit’s Soundcloud page:
https://soundcloud.com/earsplit/sets/author-punisher-women-children
