Nerthus – ‘Love Songs via Echlon’ – Eighth Tower Records
Echelon was the codename for a global surveillance network developed during the Cold War by the Five Eyes alliance – the likely suspects of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK, and the US. Originally designed to monitor Soviet military and diplomatic communications, it evolved into a sprawling signals intelligence system capable of intercepting phone calls, emails, and satellite transmissions worldwide. Though its existence was long denied, Echelon became a symbol of mass surveillance and techno-paranoia – a ghost in the wires, listening to everything and saying nothing.
That spectral presence looms large over Nerthus’ latest release on Eighth Tower Records. ‘Love Songs via Echelon’ isn’t a collection of ballads, at least not in the conventional sense, existing as scrambled messages direct from the rift between real life and existential dread. The sounds are encrypted and alien, yet oddly familiar, fusing dark ambient textures with industrial pulses and spectral field recordings – all very liminal and ooky.
The album shares conceptual kinship with ‘The Conet Project‘, the cult archive of shortwave numbers stations. Where ‘Conet’ preserves the eerie reality of coded broadcasts, Nerthus reimagines them as emotional fiction, though the track titles reference real surveillance posts, just to keep your subconscious on edge.
Opener ‘Sugar Grove’ sets the tone with static-laced drones and flickering melodic fragments, like a love letter garbled by interference. ‘Pine Gap’ stretches the tension further, stumbling beats eventually finding their feet and attaching themselves to murky drones. ‘GCHQ Bude’ brings dissonant chimes with low-frequency tension, like New Year’s Eve in an abbertoir, while ‘Menwith Hill’, nestling in unassuming (though quite posh) Harrogate, is perhaps the album’s emotional apex, with layers of ghostly harmonics over a bed of ambient slime, tendrils slowing creeping into the ether, perhaps pointing fingers at us all, but maybe only waving to clandestine friends.
Mid-album, ‘CFS Leitrim’ and ‘GCSP Tangimoana’ deepen the mood but have more approachable cohesion, suggesting intimacy among the distance and distortion. ‘Bad Aibling Station’ and ‘Teufelsberg’ have a feeling of aeons-long age, despite the technology at play. The pervading terror across the album doesn’t actually suggest a unified enemy; it’s more that we’re all under suspicion and that we’re trapped in an invisible cage. ‘GCSP Waihopai’ ends the album with the slightest suggestion that something is answering back; that these aren’t pulses sent into the air randomly, but that they are still being listened to and intercepted. At just over half an hour, the album doesn’t overstay its welcome. Instead, it lingers like a half-remembered transmission, unsettling, poetic, and strangely gentle.
Daz Lawrence