Venera – Exinfinite (PAN 153)

Having defined a multi-dimensional sonic universe on their acclaimed eponymous debut album, composer/filmmaker Chris Hunt and Korn’s James “Munky” Shaffer abandon the familiar and drift towards a kingdom of recursion on EXINFINITE, staring down a tangled mass of mirrored wormholes that hum with eldritch ambiguity. VENERA’s sophomore full length is darker, heavier and more percussive than its predecessor, but there’s something more intimate wired into its circuitry that’s harder to define – something mystical, mysterious and melancholy. Songs materialize from the void only to be dissolved by acidic synths or pierced by Hunt’s whetted beats, while Shaffer’s dense, tortured riffs are offset by euphoric, time-dilated vocals from FKA twigs, Dis Fig and Chelsea Wolfe. Following their encounter with vastness, VENERA have peered inward, ruminating on the limits of existence and excavating their most deeply buried emotions.

VENERA emerged in 2022 when Hunt and Shaffer veered into their own musical territory after recording with Albanian artist Xhoana X. Improvising together and experimenting with cinematic, sci-fi-inspired sound design, the duo realized the collaboration had potential, so they began developing and evolving the sound further, bringing in assistance from former Mars Volta drummer Deantoni Parks, Queens of the Stone Age’s Alain Johannes, post-punk duo VOWWS and LA noise rock legends HEALTH. And after their debut album appeared on Mike Patton’s Ipecac imprint in 2023, VENERA kept deconstructing and rebuilding their approach to songwriting, swapping out ambient Eno-esque atmospheres for blown-
out beats and dense textures, and figuring out how to extend the narrative they’d opened up without retreading old ground.

On ‘Tear’, the duo’s new direction can be heard clearly as Shaffer’s primal guitar noises are reformed into eerie widescreen expositions that Hunt punctuates with pneumatic kick and snare cycles. Broken up by airlock hisses and luminous synths, the track proposes a backdrop that VENERA continuously transmute, reforging the concept as the album develops. Cult singer-songwriter Wolfe adds a gothic American flavor to the crepuscular ‘All Midnights’, crooning powerfully over VENERA’s vacuum packed rhythms and gaseous synths, and Berlin-based noisemaker Dis Fig follows work with The Body and The Bug on ‘End Uncovered’ lending breathy, emotionally layered tones to Shaffer and Hunt’s tape-damaged industrial pops and whirrs. They launch squelchy, decelerated techno into occult noise reflecting pools on the slithering ‘Asteroxylon’, and Hunt replies to Shaffer’s reverberating plucks with foghorn groans on the ominous, pensive ‘uuu773’.

‘EXINFINITE’ perpetually builds momentum until it hits ‘Caroline’, an intense collaboration with FKA twigs that isolates her most unearthly tones. Initially curling her words around ominous electrical distortions and mangled, ghostly voices, twigs launches into a charged operatic cry that Shaffer and Hunt meet with skittering cybernetic beats and dense walls of guitar noise. It’s this track that fully cracks open VENERA’s concept, merging the synthetic with the natural and prompting dysphoria, loss of self and infinite regress. So the blood-curdling noise and sinister ambiance of ‘Decreation’ acts like a dissociated coda. In the ‘EXINFINITE’, destruction and death are not overcome, they’re intensified until they metamorphose completely.