One of the first sounds you hear on Seeking Darkness, the debut by Parannoul side project Huremic, is an elephant trumpeting. In typical fashion for this anonymous South Korean artist, the only details accompanying the album come from a scant Bandcamp description that, translated to English, reads: “This secondary work used the Korean traditional music virtual instrument sound source library developed by the Seoul National University Arts and Science Center.” A recording of an elephant is exactly what you’d expect to hear in a “sound source library,” right next to a revved engine and the Wilhelm scream. Parannoul has built a reputation for producing grandiose, full-band sounds out of mostly synth presets and MIDI programming, and the same holds true for Huremic. When the elephant sample pops up a second time, minutes after it first appears, it’s so artfully manipulated that it initially scans as free-jazz sax or squalls of guitar feedback.
Parannoul albums reach skyward, with emotional stakes that shine through even when the production embraces lo-fi garage band aesthetics. Huremic has entirely different goals. Seeking Darkness consists of five murky, cacophonous compositions that are simply named “Seeking Darkness Pt. 1” through “Seeking Darkness Pt. 5.” Parannoul doesn’t shy away from sprawl, usually requiring at least five minutes per track; Huremic doubles that benchmark, and Seeking Darkness clocks in at the same hour-long runtime that’s become par for the course for the musician. But while marathon-length Parannoul songs like “White Ceiling” and “Evoke Me” spend their time patiently building towards well-earned climaxes, these five often gently meander or abruptly shift, and sometimes do both within the span of a couple minutes.
This freewheeling spirit is most effective on the first, second, and fourth tracks, the wildest of the bunch. All feature melodic instruments (or at least samples that approximate guitar, bass, and keys), but their guiding lights are percussion and noise. The drums are consistently huge, bashing away busy-but-repetitive patterns that, especially when multi-tracked, recall Boredoms at their most krautrock-y. Occasional blown-out shrieks of unidentifiable origin, too, bolster the album’s madcap mission. “Seeking Darkness Pt. 2” doesn’t reach its wildest heights until its assembly line of imposingly spartan beats give way to a glitchy freakout worthy of Skrillex’s recent dubstep-reclamation album. Given “Pt. 4”’s harsh, guitarlike tones and its less cut-and-paste structure, you can squint and imagine Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo bashing strings with screwdrivers and drumsticks. “Seeking Darkness Pt. 1” has the most linear build of the three, but it follows one true master: that elephant sample, which gets less and less organic as it screeches and snakes its way through progressively heavier surroundings.
