Converter
The Four Last Things
Ant-Zen
Converter’s all too brief moment as the best-in-class powernoise act – spanning from the release of the project’s 1999 debut Shock Front through the appropriately titled Exit Ritual in 2003 – was so widely beloved that the news of a new release more than twenty years on was sure to excite the industrial cognoscenti. Especially given that Converter mastermind Scott Sturgis has remained steadfast in his in his disinterest in resurrecting the project in a live or recorded capacity, The Four Last Things existing at all is pretty remarkable, and only possible via a creative intermediary; the five tracks on the EP started life as Sturgis jams, which were then fleshed out into completed form by Daniel Myer.
With that in mind, whether the four tracks and one digital bonus song on The Four Last Things feel like “proper” Converter
songs is likely to be in the eye of the beholder. There’s certainly a lot of Sturgis’ penchant for slowly evolving distorted textures, as heard on classic cuts like the title track from Blast Furnace, and the dark ambient orchestration that accompanies the crushed and fuzzed out loops on “Martyrdom” brings to mind the more explicitly atmospheric numbers on Exit Ritual. Then again, much of what folks associate Converter with was unrelenting, barely musical arrangements of explosive rhythmic noise, a sound you’ll not find here in pretty much any capacity.
Setting that aside, there’s plenty to enjoy here if you approach the EP with expectations calibrated. “Garden of Earthly Delights” is almost NIN-like in its use of a simple lead melody buttressed by wheezing pads and saturated synth arps, a tense and menacing assembly of sounds that suggests impending violence without invoking it directly. “Death and the Miser” establishes a gradually busier and busier arrangement of fuzzed out pads and shredding percussion sequences, eventually feeding streams of noise above and through its dense forest of drum hits.
Truthfully, there’s much to enjoy across the entirety of The Four Last Things from a production and execution standpoint, and while some may be yearning for another “Death Time” or “Denogginizer” to drop into their DJ sets, it seems unlikely that Sturgis would have any interest in revisiting that particular sound, even via collaboration. Think of the EP less as a final Converter release, and more like a collaboration between two notable and influential industrial producers, and it’s unlikely you’ll have much to complain about when exploring its bleak and blasted terrain.
