Markus Guentner: Black Dahlia
AFFIN

Say the words “Black Dahlia” and many will automatically think of Elizabeth Short, the gruesomely murdered American woman whose mutilated boy was found in Los Angeles on January 15, 1947. In its achromatic image of a blossoming flower-like form, the cover adorning Markus Guentner's new solo album, on the other hand, suggests he might have been thinking about the plant native to Mexico and Central America when he embarked on fashioning its seven productions. But that might be wrong too: the title apparently derives from the name of a card in the cyberpunk-themed game NetRunner. Not surprisingly, Guentner's long been a fan of William Gibson's dystopian cyberpunk classic Neuromancer (1984), and it wouldn't be hard to imagine the recording's dark ambient soundscapes as a soundtrack to the novel.

That the new material's meticulously crafted comes as no surprise. The Regensburg-born Guentner has been releasing music for twenty-five years and garnered attention for the work he's issued on KOMPAKT, Warner, and Sending Orbs. During that time, he's also pursued work in the soundtrack area and has created music for short films and exhibition projects; over time, Guentner's musical focus has shifted to ambient and neo-classical styles, and he's also invested much creative energy into the visual presentation of his music, the new album a case in point.

All visuals for Black Dahlia were created by him, and he's created a visualiser for each track too. While they'll be rolled out in the weeks to come, the spellbinding one he created for “Midnight Sun” (and that aligns with the cover image) is currently posted at Affin's Bandcamp page for the release. To produce it, Guentner animated a photograph of nature using digital tools to show an entity slowly blooming and transforming, the imagery arresting in suggesting something organic and real yet rendered enigmatic and abstract through the treatment. It's but a small step for a theme to crystallize having to do with technological contamination of the natural world by humanity.

That the album is dark ambient is announced the moment “Shattered Remains” initiates it with foreboding rumbles and percolations. As the nightmarish soundscape expands, thick slabs of electronics flicker amidst the convulsions of a scorched terrain, and the whole seethes monstrously as it threatens to consume everything in its path. When “System Seizure” begins peacefully, it recalls earlier ambient productions by Guentner, but its tone changes with the infusion of industrial-styled textures and machine-like pulsations. With so many layers of material combined, the track grows into a churning, impenetrably opaque colossus. “Hive” likewise flirts with a more bucolic brand of ambient when shimmering organ tones dominate the sound design, even if it gradually ventures into shadowy zones where creatures chatter and thrum. “Midnight Sun” reinstates the cryptic tone of “Shattered Remains” by cloaking the material in gloom and reverb, though the intense, high-volume drift that eventually materializes calls to mind early Basic Channel and Chain Reaction releases. With a sound design consisting of rain-drenched calm, distant rumblings, and convulsive clatter, “Humanity's Shadow” suggests the world struggling to recover from devastation after the apocalypse. A hint of Burial emerges in the crackle-smeared presentation of “Downfall,” after which “The Turning Wheel” guides the album to a close with sheets of violently swelling drones and buried transmissions.

January 2025