Sep 26

Sep 26 Album Review : Andrew Nolan - Monochrome Vol. 2 : Tentacles of Spiritual Contagion (2025)

My favorite record by Swans is Soundtracks for the Blind, a 141-minute post-apocalyptic delirium where every sound feels like it’s leaking out of forgotten radio towers. When it ends, you’re never sure if you actually listened to groundbreaking music or if you accidentally stared at yourself in a mirror long enough to start hallucinating. Andrew Nolan’s Monochrome Vol. 2: Tentacles of Spiritual Contagion lives in that same half-real neighborhood.

Soundtracks plays across the blasted landscape, while Nolan’s record is what you think you hear seeping from the walls of the lone night club standing, from a distance. It’s both haunted and hallucinatory.

Monochrome Vol. 2: Tentacles of Spiritual Contagion offers ten songs and thirty-one minutes of music that feel like one walk through a dance floor filled in equal measure with angry ghosts and strung out speed freaks. It’s barren in the sense that it feels like there should be lyrics to the beats. There’s a palpable space they don’t occupy and this absence is what makes this record feel so quirky, unsettling and haunted. A couple songs do use vocals, but never in a way that feels complete or polished.

I’m not the most reliable narrator when it comes to electronic music. I couldn’t explain the gear, and I definitely couldn’t diagram the structure but what I can tell you is how it feels. On Monochrome Vol. 2: Tentacles of Spiritual Contagion, everything hinges on Nolan’s long, stretched-out bass loops. They’re the load-bearing walls of the record, steady and suffocating, while smaller details drip through like condensation in some underground bunker-turned-dancehall.

Nolan’s loops drag you toward a subterranean DJ set you’re not sure you’re supposed to be hearing. Some of the songs are dislocated and hallucinatory, others like Back Seat Driver and The Stars That Eat the Decaying Carcass of the Sky (what a great fucking title) are straight up groovy. Even if they are, but Nolan finds a way to weaponize familiarity and catchiness as they evoke a feeling of incompletion as if they were unfinished sketches of grander ideas. You end up having to fill in the inherent blanks.

There are a few tracks here that feel more “complete” in the traditional sense. Hijack the Airwaves is a drum-and-bass burner with a dancehall vocalist tearing it up, while Nothing, a galaxy-brained hip-hop track featuring KNG Bondalero and New Villain, might be the closest thing to a straight-up banger Nolan’s ever put out. And yet, these moments of convention only make the record stranger. Instead of grounding the album, they deepen its unease. The more recognizably "human" the songs get, the more they underline how absent that humanity feels everywhere else.

That’s the paradox of Monochrome Vol. 2: the tracks with obvious bodies and voices don’t resolve the ghostliness, they intensify it. They trick you into imagining a real club full of real people, only to reinforce the awkward suspicion that the crowd left years ago, and the sound system just never got the memo.

To no one’s surprise, I gravitated toward the most abstract pieces like This Splendid Hell, Onkalo and Fire Seed, but I don’t think they would land as hard without the record’s constant swerving between memory and absence. The exprimental numbers feel like they’re actively pulling away from the more conventional ones, as if driven by some all-devouring entropy. What matters isn’t just the songs themselves, but the unstable space between them.

Each track feels contaminated by the ghost of the one that came before it, bleeding into the next like a half-remembered dream you can’t shake.In that sense, Monochrome Vol. 2 doesn’t behave like a playlist or even an album. It’s closer to a haunted ecology, where grooves, fragments, and apparitions coexist, feeding on one another. It’s music that alters your sense of what presence in that room even means. Not for every pair of eardrums, but it sure it for mine.

In case you were wondering, Monochrome Vol. 1: House of Flying Daggers leans harder into hip-hop, and yes, I considered reviewing it. But after listening to Vol. 2 roughly a hundred times just to find language for the new and bizarre feelings it stirred up, I decided not to tempt fate. Tentacles of Spiritual Contagion is liminal dance music for the end times, and I mean that as a compliment. It’s uncomfortable, but it sticks. Cold, yet infectious.

The kind of paradox that shouldn’t work but somehow does, like a party that keeps going even after everyone has left.