The Soviet Uprising – World War 2020 (Ep. One)
Recommendation: ☀☁☁
The Soviet Uprising is the first chapter in a series released on HVRF that imagines a near-future third World War. It’s great for HVRF (also known as the Hardvapor Resistance Front1), which uses an ultranationalist and far-right aesthetic in its imagery, music, and social media – to the extent of re-tweeting American nationalist figures on Twitter such as Mike Cernovich in between album announcements. Not surprisingly, an album series such as this perfectly fits on such a label.
World War 2020 (Ep. One) is a single twenty-three minute long track that describes the early Russian theatre of our next Great War, evoking the mobilization of a country that has firmly re-appropriated its twentieth century heritage as Soviets. For the most part, it’s dark ambient and noise music with industrial beats: think of a hybrid of The Haxan Cloak and Lustmord. Wind sound effects permeate the background, presenting the coldest Russian winters while tanks and masked infantry loom out of blizzards like a sunken shipwreck in deep-sea gloom. About one-third of the way, wordless vocals mix with the dark ambient like György Ligeti’s “Requiem for Soprano, Mezzo-Soprano, 2 Mixed Choirs and Orchestra”, known as the monolith theme in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The overall effect is pretty striking. The quality of (hard)vapornoise on World War 2020 (Ep. One) is somewhat belied by its thematic content. HVRF might be a memetic-sounding netlabel, but there’s some seriously good stuff to be had here. This series is only a small part of that.
Tracklist
1. The Motherland Calls – (22:51)
1I categorically refuse to put the “u” in “hardvapor”. English orthography can go fuck itself.