Suspension & Displacement

1991 was a schizophrenic year for Djam Karet, splitting the sides of the band's musical personality into two album releases. Burning the Hard City captured their more aggressive, rocking side, and Suspension and Displacement delves deeply into their interest in experimental electronics. While not a full-fledged dark ambient album, Suspension and Displacement unmistakably bears that genre's stamp, full of shifting, unsettling, arhythmic soundscapes that drift like fog into the listener's subconscious. Found sounds, tape experiments, white noise, and acoustic instruments supplement the arrangements, which evoke not only more modern ambient music but also spacy progressive rock from the '70s; in fact, one of the most obvious touchstones is the creepiest material on Brian Eno's Another Green World. Like Burning the Hard City, Suspension and Displacement isn't really representative of Djam Karet's signature sound, but for fans, it's a fascinating stylistic excursion that resembles little else in the group's catalog.