A collection of sound sculptures

Zero Zero is the conceptual spawn of Melbourne-based multi-instrumentalist and producer Carmelo Grasso, and the debut full-length LP of his long-standing music project Aniseed. An extraordinarily ambitious and ballsy first-cab-off-the-rank effort, the album is as intense and challenging to experience as it is to review. The album really does, more than anything I've heard in a long time, lay bare how banal and outdated the concept of music genres really is. This is an album that does not stay in its lane. Because there is no lane.
How best to describe it in shorthand with all that in mind? Kind of spacy? Kind of scary? Stockhausen for the 21st century? A glorious muscular noisescape beating against the threshold of musicality?
The album is formless, but at the same time, it isn't. Beginnings and endings seem beside the point when listening to 'Zero Zero'; shapes and sizes seem pretty optional.
This is something that is beyond Post-Modern and might be more fittingly characterized as Post-Earth. The soundtrack of a Post-Earth milky way galaxy, where the only thing left of our planet are asteroids that contain the ghost of a long-lost civilization, indiscriminately floating around deep space. One thing that can be said for certain is that 'Zero Zero' needs to be experienced from start to finish, it is decisively long-form in its approach and doesn't lend itself to radio programming or Spotify playlists.

The album starts with something akin to a 3-track prologue, 'Zero Zero' 'Plazma' and 'Hydron', where the thing that connects the tracks isn't that they sound alike, but the fact they share a penchant for unexpected angles and formless trajectories. The soundwaves lose track of the door they first entered through, stumbling on curves and edges and then, abruptly, it all clicks, connects and holds. But only for long enough to let you feel momentarily safe.
The album takes its first shift in direction with the next track 'The Late Heavy Bombardment an electric glide in grey, remixed, bass frequencies, where power beats bite and shudder and then suddenly get pushed right into the red. This track is also the first time we hear a human voice, but on the journey the listener is on, to have something close to worldly is a disturbing and alien moment.
This is followed up by another two tracks that could be seen as brother and sister, albeit a brother and sister of different species. 'Octagon' is a wash of anguished slithering electricity, but the fact it has such an even and oddly mellow mix it is almost a mutant type of ambient drone, and 'Nytrus' slides even further towards smooth and sweet, but it still manages to feel like a drug high administered by an unseen smiling assassin.
The next track is for me the highlight of this holiday in the nether realm, the formidable 'Staggerbeats II', definitely the starkest, most single-minded piece of the album, based around a driving hypnotic beat and uniquely chilling vocals, in a more just world it would be a top-40 hit.
This is followed by the 90-second long 'metal string' which sounds like intermission music at some kind of futuristic Jupiterian cinema, fitting as it acts as a prelude to the closing act of the album. The relentless monotone hum of 'Pi' is an unnervingly intangible glimpse of light at the end of a dark corridor, the neural scratchings of phantom rats found on 'Trigography' are surprisingly toe-tappable, but as before only for short while, and without warning the albums sharpest hook turn, the wistful 'Wastelander', provides an unpredicted emotional punch. But it is an emotional punch that is thematically speaking a perfect jolt, as even though it is the most musically symmetrical, equal parts melancholic and psychedelic, it gives us no resolution to the overall tension of what we've just experienced. Like sub-atomic particles being sucked back into a huge, accelerating whole, the track ends as abruptly as it started. The offerings 'Adrift' and 'End Bag' serve as our epilogue, with the equal parts soothing/sinister bittersweet narcotic sting of 'Adrift' softening the listener up for the album's epic and ambitious closer 'End Bag', an almost neo-classical electro meditation dripping with an unshakable sense of future-fear and technocratic dread. It might be 14 minutes long, but it's no background music, you best pay attention if you want to catch all the gruesome colours in their formless glory.


It would be easy for listeners who struggle with eclectic sounds to dismiss this album as more of an abstract, artsy essay than a piece of genuine musical output, but not only would that be selling the instrumentation and production short (the sound is densely layered; if you doubt it, slap on some headphones), but it also would be missing the point that the beauty of 'Zero Zero' IS in its lack of convention. It is an aural expressionist painting: the spontaneous splashing of sound on a digital canvas. It's miles out from shore, but miles ahead of everything on land.
- Levi Krome (One of the founding members of Aniseed, 1996-2000)