I'm starting to face the fact that I have tinnitus. So far, it's proven to be a pretty mild case-- I only notice the ringing during near-silence-- but I decided it would be a good idea to take some precautions to avoid further damage. I bought several pairs of ear plugs (at the ridiculous price of $15/pair) that claim to "evenly distribute the dampening of sound across the frequency spectrum." I even schedule silence breaks to give my throbbing eardrums a proper rest. One good thing has come out of this, though: the police have stopped coming to my house about noise complaints.

I've been anticipating the latest full-length from the Iceland born-and-bred trio Stilluppsteypa since last year's subtly melodic EP, Not a Laughing Matter, but Rather a Matter of Laughs. When I received Stories Part Five-- recently released on Mille Plateaux's Ritornell imprint-- I experienced quite a scare: I feared my condition had dramatically worsened. The tremolo clicks and phase drones of the opening track, "Nice Things to File Away FOREVER!," caught me off-guard. While not quite as discomforting as my aural ailment, the song's electronics are sublimated to the point that the sound coming from the speakers approaches ubiquity (not unlike tinnitus). "Nice Things" approaches ten minutes as collapsing raygun pulses and discordant static buzz at high pitches, yet synthesis is never blatant.

As the record drones on, a pattern emerges: minimalist glitch tendencies with glimpses of beat-keeping allow the synth's atmospheric delay lines to seep through to the fore. Stilluppsteypa avoid the contemporary construct of "intelligence" in electronic music by keeping their organic explorations to the role of sound itself. Melody feels incidental, but hardly contrived; percussion is sparse and precise, but strangely warm, even in its digital synthesis. Static hums are prevalent, but they function as integral rather than ornamental. And though it resembles a rusted metal shed, there's a purveyed ambiance here that's as intriguing as it is unsettling. It's often headache-inducing, too, if listened to for extended periods of time.

Steady rhythmic patterns are only present on half of these twelve tracks, but when they are, they permeate unchanged. Of course, the patterns used are anything but conventional. "Love Brother (of the Parent's House)" pulses and clicks in a bumbling 9/8 time, and the brief set closer, "We Sure Could Do With Some Help," is something like an odd samba, which is a bizarre considering that the rest of the album is almost completely undanceable. "All Drummers Shiver" locks into a filtered, high-speed gallop-- accompanied by swells of drone and hiss-- which fades into the dirty squeaks of "Some Help."

With Stories Part Five, Stilluppsteypa have created an organic aural space from the inorganic. They play the studio like an instrument, trading in notes and structure for circularity, clicks, and drones that surge with a deranged sense of life. In fact, I was listening to the album outside while taking a noonday stroll and was overcome with a strange sense of deconstruction in the natural environment. And this would be Stilluppsteypa's gimmick if all groups had to have one: they seem to invert the natural and the inorganic.

-Christopher F. Schiel, November 19th, 2001