House of Low Culture – Submarine Immersion Techniques vol. 1

November 2000 • Crowd Control Activities

I've never like the concept of "side projects" much—how could House of Low Culture ever be as good as Isis or Agoraphobic Nosebleed or Sunn O)))? And one can't help but compare when hearing projects that are so tightly connected, almost as if Submarine Immersion Techniques was an Isis album. Even trying as hard as I can to take it on its own terms, I find it severely lacking, though it isn't terrible and has okay bits here and there.

It almost feels like you could call this release a remix album of Oceanic and Celestial, as it's loaded with Isis references and more than a few tracks are based around sampled guitar riffs from those albums. This gives it the benefit of immediately being familiar to anyone who's heard Isis before, and there's plenty of original guitar and other sounds as well to round things out.

You get two different kinds of music on Submarine Immersion Techniques: guitar-based tracks, and sample-based tracks. The guitar-based ones are by far superior: they consist of long stretches of repetitive and simple riffs, often with some sort of ambience and light noise going on in the background. It sounds a bit dull, but they do it pretty effectively; "Another Tragic One" is a standout example of the noise and guitar supporting each other. The more sample-based tracks, on the other hand, I'm not a fan of. Conceptually they mostly feel very inconsistent and out-of-place, especially with some of the more out-there sampling (AOL dial tones? really?).

So the wildly varying quality of the album makes it feel aimless and even a bit sloppy—very much like an experimental work that was basically thrown together without much thought as to what the end product would actually sound like. That's probably not very fair—I'm sure there was thought put into it—but I still find it difficult to find anything memorable or even worth relistening in this album.

I guess it's key to take in this album a bit differently than I normally would—take it as an excuse to hear Isis as run through an LSD filter and space out for forty-five minutes. It's not my ideal listening experience, but that's okay.

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