Knurl - 2018 - Primary Halciation

 

Self-released – none  206.44MB FLAC

Primary Halciation is Knurl in a focused two-part form: noise as abrasion, pressure, and physical surface. Released September 22, 2018, the album consists simply of “Part 1” and “Part 2,” which is appropriate. No decorative titles, no literary scaffolding, no big symbolic architecture. Just two slabs of activity, two exposures to a process that seems less composed than worked: scraped, forced, stressed, tightened, and thrown into motion.

Knurl is the long-running solo noise project of Canadian artist Alan Bloor, active since 1994. The project began with found objects such as car springs, scrap metal, saw blades, and other industrial detritus, drawing directly from Bloor’s experience in welding shops in Windsor, Ontario. His own Bandcamp description frames the project as an attempt to replicate the speed and intensity of grinding metal. That background matters because Knurl’s noise does not feel like abstract aggression floating in a genre cloud. It feels made from contact between resistant materials.

That is the difference between harshness as style and harshness as procedure. Knurl does not merely “sound harsh.” The work suggests forces acting on surfaces: friction, torsion, pressure, scraping, vibration, stress. A knurled surface is not smooth. It is deliberately patterned so it can be gripped. That makes the project name almost philosophical. The noise gives the ear something rough enough to hold.

Primary Halciation is interesting partly because the title sounds close to “hallucination” while refusing the ordinary spelling. “Halciation” feels like a damaged perception-word, a chemical condition, a machining defect, or a medical term misremembered after exposure to too much frequency. “Primary” makes it sound foundational: the first hallucination, the base disturbance, the original misperception produced not by fantasy, but by overload. The music fits that invented word-space. It is not dreamlike in a soft way. It is perception being forced to produce sparks.

After Merzbow’s animal-electric density, Knurl feels more tool-bench direct. Merzbow often expands into vast electronic ecology; Knurl tightens the frame around material impact. The sound seems to come from objects under duress rather than from a cosmic noise engine. That does not make it smaller. It makes it more tactile. The listener is not floating inside a storm so much as standing too close to a grinder, feeling the body learn the difference between sound and hazard.

There is also a Canadian industrial-noise lineage here worth recognizing. Knurl’s work belongs to a world of small labels, live actions, object manipulation, and long-term dedication rather than spectacular myth-making. Bloor has released widely over decades and has remained one of those artists whose persistence becomes part of the art. The point is not one grand definitive statement. The point is the repeated return to a physical question: how much form can be found inside abrasion?

The two-part structure helps answer that. Without elaborate titles guiding interpretation, the listener has to attend to changes in density, grain, movement, and pressure. One begins noticing how noise behaves: where it thickens, where it shears off, where a frequency feels like a drill-bit slipping, where a sudden opening feels less like silence than the machine inhaling. The ear becomes a hand on a rough surface.

As a Private Release post, Primary Halciation feels valuable because it brings the archive back to one of noise’s most elemental truths: sound can be made from matter resisting transformation. Wood cracks, metal screams, tape stretches, circuitry overheats, breath breaks, speakers distort. Knurl’s contribution is to keep that physical intelligence near the front. There is no need to wrap the record in occult, literary, or political scaffolding. The object-world already has enough violence and mystery.

Primary Halciation is not decorative damage. It is grip-noise: ridged, abrasive, functional in its own impossible way. It catches the ear, roughens perception, and leaves the listener with the feeling that the world’s hard surfaces have been speaking all along.