Album Review: Melk en Honing by Author & Punisher

One-man industrial band Author & Punisher is the work of Tristan Shone, an innovative mechanical engineer who dons his own custom-built aluminum-and-steel sound- generating machines to create a fascinating experience like no other. On 'Melk En Honing'— Dutch for “Milk and Honey”—Shone saws off a series of heaving, mechanized drones with names like “The Barge,” “Cauterize” and “Teething,” each a dizzying, pulsating and pounding exposition of man’s ultimate sonic collusion with machine. Shone supplies his own eerie vocals throughout—on “Shame” he sounds like late Alice in Chains singer Layne Staley—reminding us there’s a human behind all that churning metal.

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In the vast depth that is extreme music, it takes ingenuity and a great deal of creativity to set an artist apart. In Tristan Shone’s case, a background in electromechanical engineering and sculpture not only made him wholly unique in his production, but also defined his performances: a man all his own, surrounded by the great beasts of machinery he created. Shone’s sixth album as Author & Punisher, Melk En Honing, continues his experimentation in industrial and doom, blurring the line between man and machine.

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Author & Punisher — Melk En Honing (Housecore Records)Science fiction movies released in 1990, like Robocop 2 and Total Recall, were poems to the fusion of biology and technology and its associated crises. On fewer screens, a few years later, with less robotics and circuitry and spacecraft, David Cronenberg’s Crash was a wildly different exploration of the relationship between flesh and machinery and the many ways they meet. Author & Punisher (the music is heavy on the latter, but not lacking in the former) is the vehicle by which its sole member Tristan Shones explores his own interface with mechanics and electronics, substituting audio as his canvas.

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