"Soundtrack" music is kind of an odd and surprisingly common genre of experimental music. Odd in how pedestrian it tends to be. These kinds of works are usually framed as the score for an unreleased or fictional film that is meant to play in the listener's mind- casting them as the director of a movie they neither had any prior investment nor interest in.
They also tend to be self-gratifying solo excursions, with a single producer cosplaying as either John Carpenter or Ennio Morricone. In short, they lean towards the perfunctory, while asking a lot of the audience and giving back very little in return.
Horologic Mime is an exception to all these tired tropes. They're a three-piece rock band and plunderphonic production collaboration out of Italy, who share almost no DNA with the sounds of your average, afternoon Spegeti-Western buffet binge on TCM.
In fact, I'm not sure what the reference points for their first EP are... but they do not feel of this world. What they do feel like is menacing.
The moody guitar work cuts through you like a moonbeam seeking to unlock some dormant beast inside you while the rattling industrial percussion speaks to a city landscape in rapid degeneration and decay.
It's like an amped-up accompaniment to some insanely violent '90s anime OVA, like a Wicked City, Baoh, or even Iczer One. "Horn Of Plenty" perfectly conveys a sense of ominous, twilight terror, like something is slithering around your peripheral vision, carefully avoiding street lights as it tails you on your walk home.
The meandering whine of the guitars coupled with a mechanistic groove and ghastly atmospherics on "Inevitable Choice" capture the aura of an urban terrain slowly being absorbed and twisted by a creeping demonic miasma, corroding concrete and steal into parodies of human habitation in a nightmare before your very eyes.
The mood lightens slightly on "Human Child" where cartoonish vocal performances are recut into a series of amusing tailspins of nonlinear conversation, but the searching synths and the steadily intensifying heat of the surrounding feedback still convey a sense of barrenness and desperation.
Then there is "Cleanliness Within," a seething cybernetic sludge mire march, that could drain all the hopes people project into the cloud for technology to answer our benighted prayers and reducing these dreams into a putrid, silicon-evaporating, acidic downpour of dread.
They call it soundtrack music- sounds created to help breathe vibrancy into still images as they come to life. But Horologic Mime sound more like a massacre- a fiendish crime forever preserved on celluloid, an endless shudder for posterity.
