At the heart of ‘Secret Habit’ is the dramatism of punching loud and highly strung noise through plaintive ambience, a hot/cold switch which is performed the moment the title track’s pastel drift is punctured by the Dave Phillips-meets-Facialmess uproar of “Anchored and Bound”. It’s a scene which then repeats with as much class (if less surprise) over the remainder, the noise electronics cut and mangled fiercely and precisely, and the moribund washes of ambient carefully if monochromatically draped.
The familiarity of these elements within modern cut-up noise shouldn’t – and doesn’t – detract from their clever work here, but some commingling of treatment – acoustic metals and voice snippets in the noise maelstrom of “Manipulative Fuck”, the fury of a train field in “Trust Issues”, and the sympathetic unravelling which opens “Let Me In” – are what I find memorable.
That core interplay of sound is lost overside upon “The Fire That Burns The Brightest Fades The Quickest” kicking in, a lengthy piece of stretched trumpet tones and gusting electronics which reminds me of Bill Laswell’s remixing of Miles Davis, and into the brief “Dissassociation” which uses similar electronics to underpin sampled choking and gasping for a brief flirt again with the cassette’s needed drama. The two are diminutive within a cassette which – until their arrival – permitted no time for a deep break or shift in attention.
While a sense of raw emotion is difficult to extract, the highly scrutinised creation of ‘Secret Habit’ is impossible to fault. Those wanting raw noise intuition are really in the wrong place – Purgist thrives on composition, placement, and precision.
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