VS--55 - CH0 0-00-01 (LP)

CH0 0:00:01 VS--55CH0 0:00:01 is the latest dispatch from VS--55, the ongoing collaborative project led by Jonas Rönnberg, the Swedish electronic musician, producer, label founder, and artist also known as Varg2™. The band recorded the album while living at The Foundry, the experimental art space housed in a 19th-century armaments and military equipment factory on the edge of the French Pyrenees.The Foundry was created by artist Andrei Molodkin, and designed and run together with his life partner, architect Arianna Mondin. One of their core missions is to support highly experimental and avant-garde projects that could not be realised elsewhere. In this spirit, they supported the VS--55 music project with visual direction, design, and video production. The Russian-born artist, well known for his sculptures with crude oil and human blood, and who recently went viral for holding 46 million dollars' worth of artworks hostage in a 29-ton Swiss bank safe in exchange for the life of Julian Assange, is also the author of the CH0 0:00:01’s artworks. The entrance of The Foundry is marked by a large neon sign that flickers between "LAUGHTER" and "SLAUGHTER" — apt wordplay for the collective mood behind CH0 0:00:01, an abstract collection of vaporous fragments and humming frequencies, “anti-music” captured primarily through a deconstructed cinema organ, layered and sequenced to visceral effect, akin to stumbling upon absurd and unsettling surveillance footage. As heavy as the set scans, Rönnberg maintains, "it’s not that serious, it’s a mockery of society, the comedy of its absolute tragedy, a documentation of the time we're in right now, where culture is dead. Like my version of the Benny Hill song, when people die." During their two-month stay at The Foundry, Rönnberg, Simon and Anya naturally leaned into a kind of raw, and utilitarian, discipline. Life and work are coextensive at The Foundry: metal that was melted to shape military equipment was converted into an experimental art space, where disciplines collide to form a new language, as a weapon against the structures of power. From the past to present, the target is the same: the heads of people. It's not unusual for Rönnberg to be in this state of immersion, as he has, in essence, lived in his art for more than a decade. Sonically, however, the resulting project has no precedent in his catalog. Staggering in its starkness, there is very little instrumentation on CH0 0:00:01; moments of barely-there guitar, piano, and vocals churn under with the album’s central engine, a French cinema organ that the group propped next to air compressors and a Sony cassette dictaphone, all run into a giant club sound system. From the feedback, melodies and basslines emerged, giving the tracks an unpredictable howl and a haunting quality, as if they’ve been summoned. Opener "Laughter" establishes the tone, a disorienting buzz with echoes of, perhaps, slaughter. Rönnberg slept in a room called “the church”, which was filled with CIA torture documents. Voices permeate the mix; "Poison Tits" drifts between angelic whispers and reptilian growls, tracing the hypnotic pull of addiction. The song imagines heroin as a distant sun that is impossible to resist. Like insects drawn to a fatal light, people surrender themselves to its warmth, mistaking destruction for transcendence. Rising toward the promise of illumination, they find that the closer they come, the more completely they are consumed. In the end, the sun burns everything that dares to love it too deeply. "Chechny Crude Oil" follows a spoken word through corridors of sludge, and “Snyft, Mina Tårar Dom Rinner” buries Swedish lyrics beneath rattling percussion and erratic strums. Discordant noise often gives way to flashes of resonant beauty; the silvery shrieks of "F-02 Semtex" shift to a warmer airiness in "Avenue Maréchal Pt. 1". The industrial quakes of "Midnattsmord" ("Midnight Murder") topple into the serene static of “F-03 Dilute”. Cathartic standout "Crawler" sets rapid-fire whispers and sighs against a booming, punishing pulse. The lyrics are poetry that stalk in the shadows of capitalism, and the forces that guard it, tracing a world where control moves quietly, yet reaches everywhere. A slow march of distortion dissipates on closing track "F-04 Dissolve", leaving only plaintive keys adrift. "This is a soundtrack, I would say. And for what? I don't know," questions Rönnberg. "A humoristic disaster, and that's about it." He considers CH0 0:00:01 a documentation more so than as a direct musical expression, one that’s most powerful in its opacity, and needn't be fully decoded to be understood and felt.