Bloom Offering

Bloom Offering

Episodes

Helen Scarsdale Agency

Bloom Offering is the synth-wave / blighted electronic project of Seattle’s Nicole Carr. Having released a handful of well-received cassettes through Clan Destine, Aught Void, and Sinneslöschen, Bloom Offering presents her debut LP Episodes through The Helen Scarsdale Agency.  In her development as an artist and technician, Carr has steadily honed her abilities in sculpting sharply cold electronics and declarative vocals set upon propulsive spines of whipcrack snares and throttled kick drums. Episodes strikes us as the refinement and culmination of those motifs into a compulsive communion with bleak noise, dark-eyed melody, controlled rhythm, cathartic release and emotional drainage. The opening track “Swallow Me Whole” is one of many pyrrhic anthems of resolute disdain for the current social order with its frantic rhythms complicating the moody arrangements. “Venus Shrugged” maintains a stately almost haughty sequence of synth stabs, evoking the sexual politics of the male gaze and any woman who choses to look for herself. The scornful “Out 2 Get U” was penned as a stark banger of unrelenting, industrial techno in the the wake of the panic and paranoia against the post-Weinstein groundswell of feminine rage; yet in the constant headlines of men behaving badly, Bloom Offering’s curse remains necessary. Episodes questions the positions of gendered power in mirroring back Carr’s existential anxiety through her roughly engineered body music and minimal wave shadowplay. For ancillary listening references, Chris & Cosey, Lebanon Hanover, DVA Damas, and the rhythmic facets of Janushoved might of use.