Shredded Nerve ‘Longing To Be Free’ C-36 (Dead Gods)

‘Longing To Be Free’ marks something of a return to the careful repetitions I recall from Justin’s early work, yet progressed to be immersed in his shift to electronic sounds and exploring a suite of influences I’ve not heard emerge from Shredded Nerve yet. The layers of solemn synth melodies, supporting monotonal meditations, and carefully honed haunt are an intuitive but distant progression from last year’s ‘It Was Meant To Be’, evoking ‘70s synthesizer creations a la Tangerine Dream, with a strong nod to horror synth minimalism and a hint of the darkly pensive experimentation of Deathprod.

Melodic sensibilities come and go, opener “Between A Lie And The Truth” almost hummable in its slow tunefulness and experimental sensibilities found instead in the insistent texture created by a gentle tap drip being effected to bring the sound to a shimmering murmur. B side opener “Before And After (Time And Shadow)” also allows a melodic synth lead to guide the piece, with its simple repetition underpinned by hoarse lower register drone and reflective sympathetic harmonics which scatter like light hitting a prism. “You Never Existed” however strips back to portray lightweight sounds carried in the air like Klaus Schulze conjurations, synth plumes floating serenely as a low-end pulse and singes of solar wind fill out the Kosmische picture, for a track which is somehow both the potential link to Justin’s earlier recordings and the genesis for this breakout exploration.

After “Before And After (Time And Shadow)”  the remainder of the B side takes greater filmic inspiration, the title track adding iconic staccato chiming tones and a scatter of foley footfalls for a strong ‘80s horror film scene of nearing dread, which materialises when its lower drone eventually rubs raw to expose some nastier edges in a rare acknowledgment of Shredded Nerve’s earlier discography. That’s followed by closer “You Were Different”, which elongates the final scene of morning survival: an almost triumphant melodicism circling over warmer rays of layered tonal drone which flicker and disperse into more open chordal layers. The slow fade-out allows another quick reminder of Justin’s pedigree, as tape drop-out flutters impugn the embrace of the piece – but it’s a small show of avantgarde know how to end a cassette dedicated far more to the congenial end of electronic music.

In perhaps the same way that Emeralds came from the late ‘00s experimental underground but emphasised the genre’s Berlin School roots, ‘Longing To Be Free’ steps away from Shredded Nerve’s modern leanings to explore electronic music in a way that is just as genuine as ‘Final Vision’ or ‘Bleeding From The Head’. With very few moments of raw sound or noise impetus ‘Longing To Be Free’ is unlikely to be reflective of a long-term commitment if Shredded Nerve’s history is anything to go by, but as a sidestep this cassette is lovingly executed, utterly immersive, and a perfect late night replacement for when I want something beyond classics like ‘Cyborg’ or ‘Zeit’.

Lasse Marhaug ‘Four Seasons Only Winter’ CD (Sentimental)

The Norwegian winter found cruel reflection in Lasse Marhaug’s ‘White Inferno’ (a 1996 cassette released on Mother Savage Noise Production, latter reissued on CD by Narcolepsia/Old Captain) and again in 2007’s ‘The Great Silence’ CD (on Second Layer). ‘Four Seasons Only Winter’ finds a different focus in the deep snow, beautiful in its painting of Lasse’s remote surrounds but exuding the isolation of a long winter and social distancing unprovoked by a global pandemic.

Single drifting mid-range tones fall slowly through the first season undisturbed, the background a silent white and the trajectory barely moving even as the listener’s focus is drawn in, soft waves of ambience vaguely shaping the contours of the landscape and frequently getting lost in the monochromatic blurring of frosted land and snow-filled sky, and the shallow gradient between night and day.

As the CD moves on the basic canvas is the same, but by the second season the isolation intensifies and reality is compromised, blurred psychoses moving from peripheral vision to the centre, flashes of hallucinatory colour heightened by a low-end presence creeping in – surely the onset of hypothermia. It’s an active and almost vibrant piece contextually – but scary for being so, its vibrancy playing out as delusion rather than genuine hope or seasonal shift.

The final two seasons confirm that wintry despondency, the third hovering a cloud of frozen breath in the air as a cold low hum idles ominously, space closing in on the listener over the lengthy sunless concentration, only to be subsumed by the even longer and wonderfully immense fourth season, its polyphonic drone wrapping the piece in various shares of white while reflecting the rays of the sun finally crawled from the horizon. An inherently musical quality embraces the track in much the same way as Birchville Cat Motel did at Campbell’s best, a crescendo of ever-unfolding tone continuing to emerge from the track as inflections come and go, emphases and tones shift, and the tundra fades into the distance without disturbance.

‘Four Seasons Only Winter’ is one of three simultaneous releases by Sentimental, but the only one in an enduring edition – 200 copies, compared to editions of 20 and 40 respectively for the ‘My Body As A Cavern’ 2x12” and ‘No Authentic Sound Left’ reel tape. It’s also the most restrained and most thematically resolute of the three, unwavering in attention to its carefully realised  ambience, and small details – notably the meticulous low-end of the second and third seasons, and subtle tonal transpositions through the final season. This is faultless frozen ambient from a man who clearly knows.

Uton & Yoshihiro Kikuchi ‘Invisible Reflections’ CD (Vibora)

The Vibora label is something of a shifting collective, a chance for underground labels to pool resources and collaborate (financially, if not necessarily artistically) to realise quality CD pressings, the label’s 2019 resurrection realised from two underground collaborations – first a double CD of recordings by Umpio and irr.app.(ext.), and now this meeting of Finnish time/space manipulator Uton with the always intriguing Yoshihiro Kikuchi, who has a penchant for curious collaborative ventures.

‘Invisible Reflections’ is perhaps Yoshihiro’s most immediate collaboration yet, computer creations and melodica colliding with digital electronics from Uton which on opener “The Black Horse Of Mutated Ideas” fractures into a morass of competing analogue and digital particles, its twitching digitalia and resonant acoustic drone effervescing like being shaken in a test tube. The outcome bears too much early ‘00s digital baggage, provoking the same complaints which shook Merzbow’s early steps into laptop creation: a shallowness and predictability in shape, and a gap between risibility and potency which – at least for this luddite – made such work so difficult a proposition. “Spectral Source” and “Multidimensional Relation” strike the same difficulty even if starting from more minimalist places, the former encountering slippery digital intangibility and the latter troublesomely thin melodica manipulation, both seeming to hit technical or technique limits.

But where ‘Invisible Reflections’ achieves is in its stretches of post-Jarl drone, the extended pieces “A Signal For Reflection”, “The Cosmic Unknown” and “Infinite Possibilities” all unclear with where one artist stops and the other begins. These polar excursions  find drone materials bouncing off the tundra to be frozen together, strong glares emitting from the icy shimmer and movement slowed to aqueous stammer as electronics, melodica and digital processing are reduced to a sympathetic shiver.

While these tracks all take from the same frozen heart, each travels the veins differently. “The Cosmic Uknown” encounters drips of lysergic acid which start to cycle through the flow at its fingertips, and “A Signal For Reflection” seeping into the ground as a semi-melodic fluidity starts to puddle at the underside of the piece as it melts. “Infinite Possibilities” too starts to separate, but only because competing astral forces start to tear at it: the lulling low-end is surprisingly propulsive, sending the track skimming to the edge of the solar system as it looks back longingly as the slowly fading presence of terrestrial movement, the ghost of Eric Wood grinning from the co-pilot chair – and the brief, ominous swell of sound which occurs as the final seconds of the piece breach the heliosphere are almost terrifying.

The usefulness and limitations of this pair’s chosen instrumentation are what ultimately shape ‘Invisible Reflections’, the lengthy subzero investigations disrupted by difficult shorter pieces which scratch the scabs of computer noise limitations in a way the many whose work has progressed over the last decade do not. The slow marches across the tundra are more visceral, meaningful and memorable, their collaboration more genuine and integrative than the mangle of sound which the other tracks tend to crumple into.

https://uton.bandcamp.com/album/invisible-reflections

GX Jupitter-Larsen & Pain Jerk ‘Reference Desk’ C-20 (Noiseopoly) & Pain Jerk & Zbigniew Karkowski ‘Live-Enemy’ CDR (Culture)

 

When I first heard about ‘Reference Desk’ I was sitting in an LA café for a late breakfast and a catchup. By the time the cassette landed at my post office box, the Covid-19 pandemic had heaved, isolated, and wreaked untold havoc, and expectation had been festering throughout. In what I believe is the first time the two have shared a release, ‘Reference Desk’ was released as part of GX Jupitter-Larsen’s fundraiser for his forthcoming movie of the same title. What it says about the movie I won’t even speculate – let’s make do with the cassette for now.

One Side has Kohei Gomi manipulating raw sound from pump sounds authored by GX, the heavy lungfuls of the pump in constant cycle as Kohei’s sub-bass infiltration and chirping interference stays mostly at the fringes, occasional glimmers of colour increasing somewhat over the course of the piece to become a staged set of fireworks by the end. The inflections are a little disconnected from the raw mechanised breathing of GX’s source material, almost invisible to begin with an even at their peak struggling to make an impression.

Other Side finds a bubbling repetition met with raw metallic scraping, backwards treatments and acoustic detritus by GX, a more considered interaction where the search for source material – books sounds by Pain Jerk, processed and re-recorded by GX – much more difficult, the blistering undercurrent submerged with heavy, resonant, toolshed textures.

For two title belt holders able to still inflame an ordinary situation into noise oblivion, ‘Reference Desk’ is a restrained study, befitting the library reference – but probably still making enough of a ruckus to be asked to leave the reading room. Those after a truly disruptive ruckus won’t find it, but the B side especially brings the two together in an entirely satisfactory way nonetheless.

Pain Jerk has emerged from something of a self-imposed scene exile, a stream of Bandcamp releases and the ‘Mission Invisible’ CD on Hospital giving plenty to chew on after forcing the audience to starve for some time. ‘Live-Enemy’ is one of several online releases to now find their way onto CDR, finding Pain Jerk working extensively – and successfully – with Polish experimentalist Zbigniew Karkowski, who lived and worked in Tokyo during the final years before his sad passing in 2013.

The CDR is led by a pair of live collaborations, an excerpt from a 21 October 2008 set in Poland opening with a surge of crumpled 0s and 1s which are torched by noise electronics until the entire concoction ignites, the immolated remains left to smoulder in the grieving hum of charred equipment. The track is excerpted from a longer set and feels truncated perhaps as a result, making its point quickly and without any of the force or development of the longer track which follows.

The second track is more considered, a 2012 Tokyo performance with extended agony perpetrated by both: an initial haunt of burgeoning high end fed chunks of gurgling digitalia, voice snippets and data error until the piece ruptures into canonical harsh noise from Kohei Gomi. Once that beast is off the leash there’s no getting it back on, the two seeming to take it in turns to push a dominant voice while the other adds an undercurrent of stability. Zbigniew’s garish digital brushstrokes run dry well before Kohei Gomi’s harrowing saturations. Pain Jerk is in unstoppable form during this collaboration once the restraints are off, a dense and heavy presence force which suffocates Zbigniew’s material in the ultimate, and forces it to suffer well before that.

Kohei supplements the material with a solo track, “Dedcated to ZK”, the first half teasing slow tone undulations, rubberised shapes of highly constricted synth burble and a sputtering bass presence, all masticated by Gomi’s laptop and eventually subjugated to sprays of near-white noise which only briefly open into more detailed layers: a fairly brief excursion into the fulsomely bricked noise which the collaborative tracks have already delivered in abundance. Things return fairly perfunctorily to an extension of the squelching repetitions from before, as if nothing really happened in the meantime, before ending upon the same orchestral tiptoeing which began the piece.

There’s an overt digital sterility to “Dedicated to ZK” which the other pieces on the CDR don’t rely upon, and which shapes particularly the noise component in an unfortunate way; even when the harsh components are set to ultra-stun they lack the depth and grain of the dual live attack, their brevity and the piece’s digital flatness turning the tribute more into a longing. The point to ‘Live-Enemy’ is really made by the collaborative tracks, the solo supplement a recognition which somewhat misses the object of its recollection.

https://painjerkwrackedandruined.bandcamp.com/album/live-enemy

Xome & Death Squad ‘Life: Quit It/Automaton’ C-64 (Neural Operations)

This is one of four split cassettes which were originally shared by Death Squad in 1996, and were reissued by Michael Nine in 2020 alongside his early Off World Kick Death Square project. This cassette’s brief re-emergence adds a few more pieces of knowledge to the formation of both Xome and Death Squad, and had been a curiosity of mine for a while given the seemingly difficult compatibility of the two projects.

Xome’s early work is distant from the exuberant effects ping pong Bob Scott would come to master and particularly across ‘Life: Quit It’. These early experimentations utilise flows of dark distortion as their primary noise construct, “Xome Supreme Truth Cult” and “トラック野郎” only buoyed by extraneous inputs of what are predominantly voice – looped yelling and various chatter – after an intentionally slow and dreary start. The final two tracks, dominated by “Melt”, are a grab-bag of audio oddities with even less of the noise Xome would come to be known for, moments of distortion peaking to give some asphalt blur to what is otherwise a montage of slowed speech, found city sound, and God-knows what, inflating into a rumble of low-end which vibrates under flickering loops, messy media manipulation and what I think may be the cries of abused children’s toys.

While like most Xome material I suspect the end results are live-to tape mandates, there is preparation to the sampled, found, and pre-arranged sound which ensures plenty of change across the half hour notwithstanding the quite straight forward course of the generated distortion which is embraced. The exuberance of later releases manifests here as a delight in the various pre-arranged inputs, which even if somewhat crude add streaks of colour to the otherwise monochrome noise.

Death Squad’s ‘Automaton’ lacks the terrorising presence which the project later developed, but is a more fully-formed realisation of the project in comparison to the site of Xome’s branch on the evolutionary tree. While only given a single title the side is broken into seven or so shorter segments, at its best in painting grainy noise textures using rumbling analogue low-end, shortwave radio hum, dying consumer electronics and lungfuls of smoggy distortion.

There’s a choking haze to this material which would only become thicker and more hurtful as Death Squad finessed its sound, but on ‘Automaton’ it’s a viscous cloud, hanging in the air densely and being unavoidably inhaled. Clumps of obscured hazards cling to its particles, as drips of gargled high end are expectorated, dying equipment throbs smoke, and loops pump the sickly air back upon itself. The concentration of sooted noise glimpses only minimal movement in the worse afflicted pieces, ‘Automaton’’s segments tending to work small movements only to have those covered in yet more grime, although the loop-based portions tent to develop a circular breathing which develops slightly more clarity – and the end of the tape weighs the  atmospheric churn down to the ground, finally hitting the dirt with a more resolute low-end tremor.

While both projects were in 1996 still shedding their formative experience, Death Squad already sounds like it should be with violence and distrust growing over time behind the poisonous clouds of ‘Automaton’ and other mid-1990s works. Xome would ultimately find a joy in harsh noise which is only hinted at in ‘Life: Quit It’ – and only realised in the sound inputs, not the noise itself. Whether adjacent to later familiarity or not, this cassette is an insight into both acts: a chance to understand each a little better, both delivering competent material without either yet at the point which would be their ultimate contribution.

Bacillus ‘Anti-Vaxxer’ C-30 (Glossolalia)

Bacillus’ 1990s tapes hold a unique place in the American noise lexicon of that time, raw in a way which Macronympha and Richard Ramirez were not. The works created – a largely unchanged process, it seems – from mangled and destroyed records and tapes, broken consumer electronics, and strangling distortion derived from pushing levels to the maximum, but off-set against that dumpster diver creationism was a studious fascination with microbes, pathogens, and danger lurking in minutiae: a (literally) unhealthy death fetish far removed from the familiar violent tropes of harsh noise.

It’s no surprise that in this year’s pandemic Bacillus should re-(re-?)emerge, another viral wave to contend with on the cusp of the world retreating into self-isolation. The cassette documents recent measles outbreaks and the anti-vaccination hysteria which fuelled them, but its timing in relation to the current pandemic – not to mention the protests currently looking to undo social distancing and related protections – makes ‘Anti-Vaxxer’ unavoidably relevant as I stay at home to avoid a virus which is wreaking havoc in many corners of the globe.

In 2020 the works are often longer and less mercurial than the early Bacillus particles, tracks such as “Misinformation Spreads, Taking Disease With It” and “Fatal Risks Of Persistant Myths” dwelling on single or small groups of pathologies and “The New Rise Of Preventable Diseases” melting into a self-perpetuating spread of unchanging viscosity which reflects Peter Keller’s recent works of stasis more than the unsettled fearmongering of his old Clotted Meat Portioning cassettes. The noise is as nasty and rough as ever, but its agility is significantly declined, strength in self-generation favoured over unexpected jumping between patients.

“Outbreaks Of Disease Once Conquered” is a highlight for reverting to Bacillus’ familiar structural instability, jarring cut-ups, and stereo spectrum severance, but the nervousness invoked on earlier works is much harder to find on ‘Anti-Vaxxer’ when it settles into a pleading grind, that lurking fear replaced instead with a more suffocating insistence – periodically broken by samples which drive home the thematic masthead and also serve to break up heavier chunks of noise as in “Complacency Leaves you Exposed” (a technique which can either distract or dissect depending on timing and use). “ImmuNoCompromise” goes further in instead constructing itself from sampled material, swerving its gasping noise around what sounds like a high school argument, its loud voices competing in urgency with the constrictive noise for an unexpectedly memorable diversion.

While of the same strain as what came before it ‘Anti-Vaxxer’’s looser construction hints at the heavier end of the type of manual noise Expose Your Eyes and Dogliveroil realised – while still firmly mired in an mid-1990s Americanoise blown-out saturation informed – but informed by noise wall stasis and with samples almost a little too clean in their execution, as the main updates to Bacillus’ previously squalid but highly-strung noise vignettes.

The update in packaging is even more noticeable, Glossolalia using plenty of laser printer paper to deliver a folded A5 cover and a swag of research materials and collage materials, as well as an ampoule of vaccine so you or someone you love isn’t the next victim. It’s an extensive and acknowledging provision of space and resources, and a worthy addition to a discography which – even with a recent upsurge in cases – is still one of the rarer Americanoise of the last 25 years.

https://bacillus.bandcamp.com/album/anti-vaxxer

Kadaver & Vomir 'Kadavomier' CDR (Inner City Uprising)

Vomir has spent over a decade creating works of immersion, a celebration of stasis with which to shut out the world and be consumed by sound. Into that ideal Romain Perrot has this time allowed Kadaver’s Michael Zolotov some space to merge his flayed noise electronics, the two realising ‘Kadavomier’ as a single extended track on Australia’s Inner City Uprising label - or split across two sides of a cassette pressing on The Hills Are Dead Records for those needing a breather and a walk across the room inside their 68 minutes of listening. In addition to realising the collaboration in its unedited form the CDR adds seedy collage art from Cursed Earth Cassettes’ Ben Schmidt which I prefer to the cassette’s somewhat hastily realised cover, making the disc the preferred version (other than for analogue format snobs, of course).

After an opening grab of movie dialogue – the importance of which is lost on me – as expected Vomir sets up a dominating central deluge, a resolute current with a hefty mid-range span and peaking surface which runs the entire length of the hour-long piece. Kadaver then forms and moves shapes under the surface and slotted into Vomir’s strong current, strewing bubbles of flange, low-end shadow, and smaller distortion deviations through the choppy Vomir singularity, eventually building to add a rotary blade insistence, contact microphone creasing and unrestrained effect pedal squall in its closing maelstrom.

As its strongest the piece almost vibrates as Kadaver’s intrusions filtrate through Vomir’s central contribution, the final quarter of the piece swelling in size as violently created noise electronics are layered as much as possible over the mainstay timbre (still never fully obscuring it), but earlier subtler infusions cloud or even obscure Romain’s smouldering texture in a more cautionary way, as if probing for weaknesses before ultimately deciding that only an all-out assault is capable of taking down the Frenchman’s construct. Those earlier forays are difficult to catch but cleverly shape the bulk of the lengthy disc, giving ‘Kadavomier’ hints of life and movement even as one of its architects wants to smother all of that with a black garbage bag.

From afar ‘Kadavomier’ seems immobile but the collaborative injection scatters plenty of finely adjusted detail through the piece, creating a track which on close listen is far more turbulent. I struggle to fully appreciate truly minimalist and unchanging harsh noise wall creations, but ‘Kadavomier’ only takes what it needs from that subgenre, testing its capacities with finer perforations before pressing a major morass through; and giving unsettled home listeners like me points within the piece to locate, extract, and chase in development – all without compromising the focus of Vomir’s missive.

https://innercityuprising.bandcamp.com/album/kadaver-vomir

Beatriz Ferreyra ‘Echos +’ 12” (Room 40)

Beatriz Ferreyra’s work has found constrained dissemination compared to many other GRM alumni, only a handful of releases emerging in over 50 years of work. ‘Echos’ follows Room40’s Lawrence English performing with Ferreyra in Portugal and Brazil, as well as bringing her to perform in Australia in 2018, and is a significant addition to the Argentinian’s body of recorded work.

The title-track of ‘Echos +’ is a montage of looped, spliced and layered a capella vocals to four Latin-American songs, the focus on audible tape manipulation rather than any greater performer input or manipulation. Ideas are looped, cadences are ruined, and fragments multiplied across the eight and a half minutes of the piece, but the focus wears a little thin. Created in 1978 “Echos” is somehow the most familiar piece of the LP, its editing and layering reflective of the roots of electroacoustic music as no doubt linked to Ferreyra’s tenure at GRM, albeit but with a personal focus linked to the vocal performances which I find somewhat limiting in impact. As an exercise in technique the piece is clever, but I find its listenability more difficult.

“L’Autre … Ou Le Chant Des Marécages” (“The “Double” Or The Swamp’s”) is again derived from vocal performances, but with a performer input far more marked than the lighter touch of “Echos”. Elongated tones are seemingly constructed from teasingly slowed vocal notes, and create an immediate menace to the piece; “L’Autre … Ou Le Chant Des Marécages” frequently returns to the familiarity of those billowing stretches as a kind of comfort creation, but it’s its need to find that comfort which makes the piece special. Repeated sharp syllabic jabs and wilder yowled, yelled and yelped fragments – verging at its peak in near-riotous climax – lift the piece out of any languorous want, fiercely colouring the piece like blood spatter on snow. The breaths, tics and murmurs which skirted the edges of “Echos” are on this second piece part of a arsenal of honed, bright lashings, vivid punctures of sound which flash across the dark stretches of the piece: the “double” which the title speaks of, and which the liner notes describe as a paradoxal personality, split between vibrant colour and the dark subject of matter of Cendrars’ ‘Moravagine’ in a complex convergence of tonality, texture and dynamic impact.

The centrepiece of ‘Echos +’ is 2007 composition “L’Autre Rive” (“The Other Shore”) which assumes the entire B side, a haunting piece utilising percussion and additional electroacoustic sound. The sound manipulation is more integrative than the first side, the percussion performance itself  – such as the timpani swells which alchemise into circularities of sound, its tom rolls which billow reverbed smoke and a comet’s tail of electronics dust, a jazz cymbal riff swallowed by delay, and gong or cymbal scrapings which are stuttered and manipulated more into animal cries than any instrumental output – immersed in technique, and finessed with additional sound inputs.

The piece itself, inspired by the Bardo Thödol (Tibetan Book of the Dead), merges those percussive shocks with dark swathes of largely ambient sound for a genuinely haunting affect making full use of the composed sounds and the spaces between them. The first half of the piece is littered with emergent scares of sparse percussion and sympathetically minimalist treatments, a more dominant sound input from Beatriz emerging moreso over the second tranche of the piece, which is in part led by set pieces of shock which are provoked by volume-driven swells of semi-orchestral noise or aeoliphone-type disturbance, and which rise up in volume and intensity as if reaching a skeletal arm at an unsuspecting passer-by. Beatriz’s heavier sound elements seem to include instrumental off-cuts, voice, reverb-heavy synthesis and even some jarring junk percussion-type elements played against Richard Aratian’s percussion performance, the electroacoustic elements initially structured around the percussive sparks before seeming to switch into a primary role over the later half of the piece. It’s an immersive, unpredictable and somehow darkly humourous piece which stands up to repeat listens – it’s had a lot here since ‘Echos +’ arrived – easily, never failing to engage, surprise and delight.

Moving on from the perhaps timid approach of its title track, ‘Echos +’ is electroacoustic music in full flight, constantly blurring the line between acoustic and imagined, between treatment and creation, and between Beatriz herself as performer and those whose creativity births her works. While distanced from modern experimental music in its genesis, the imprint of Ferreyra’s work is found in contemporary realisations of dark ambient and Dadaist sound creation, and is an excellent introduction for those genre dwellers who have yet to explore historical/academic works with a similar inclination.

https://room40.bandcamp.com/album/echos

The Gerogerigegege ‘Piss Shower Girlfriend’ 12” (FOAD)

Adherents know that while The Gerogerigegege may forever be labelled a noise project, it frequently – sometimes infuriatingly – isn’t. 2016 comeback album ‘Moena Hai’ was an exquisite combination of ambient craftmanship, field recordings and in-the-red shoegaze riffing which was somehow easily defining of the project even in its sprawl. But the following LPs were appropriated from 1970s pop schtick in that nonchalant fuck-you way the project delivers in spades, and newly self-released editions were a confusing mess of archival curiosities, self-bootlegged bootlegs, and a revised presentation of classic LP ‘Senzuri Champion’.

Within all that mess of culled cultural excess, lo-fi curiosities, rehearsal circumspection and hint of class, Juntaro Yamanouchi’s credentials as a noise artist lay untouched and seemingly uncared for in the project’s resurrection, but ‘Piss Shower Girlfriend’ is the exaltation of volume, distortion and abandon which has been lying in wait the last four years of the project (at least). ‘Piss Shower Girlfriend’ effects a more immediate and volume-dependent bustle than even ‘Senzuri Champion’’s centrepiece “Violence Onanie” but is similarly liberally noisy and unrestrained. The LP is a festering squall of high volume feedback and vocal noise, with a heavy Masonna feel in its slashes of shrieking vocal gibberish, cleaving feedback air, flip-switch effect injections and occasional pauses of equipment faltering in overheated exhaustion.

While the first side is utterly primal and unhinged, departing only from its shriek-and-howl template with a bath of reverb in final track “Piss Shower Telephone #4”, the second side seems to push some (probably sampled) junk clatter and movie script speech through its raucous amplification, those moments of performed downtime then fuelling spasmodic spurts of fierce movement, garbled vocal jags and greater equipment defeat/interruption.

Each side plays out as a single piece but let’s not forget that – of course – each isn’t. The LP purports to contain 13 tracks even if it doesn’t really, and to make it better the track titles are divine as only Juntaro could do: personal highlights are “Piss Shower Girl, You'll Be A Woman Soon” and “Piss Purple Draank (T.V Bastard)”. For bonus points the pressing is a picture disc, cheesecake muscle men innocently handstanding, their smile and serene pose at dubious odds with the vibrant audio content.

I get why The Gerogerigegege is a difficult or taboo project for many, but any and all unpreparedness or selectivity is out: ‘Piss Shower Girlfriend’ has to be the exception for anyone yearning for liberated and deranged harsh noise with a juvenile fascination for loudness, feedback and human caterwaul. ‘Piss Shower Girlfriend’ is the LP which will yet again entrench The Gerogerigegege in the noise consciousness, and lead to a whole new round of disappointments as that newly attracted audience find the next few releases to bear no sonic resemblance or care for convention.

http://www.foadrecords.it/

Gnaw Their Tongues ‘I Speak The Truth, Yet With Every Word Uttered, Thousands Die’ CD/LP (Consouling Sounds)

If Maurice De Jong’s recent releases as Hagetisse, Golden Ashes and in duo Dodenbezweerder speak to different paths of black metal historicism, Gnaw Their Tongues is intent on abandoning that association. Only the final tattered remnants of Maurice’s genre trappings are still stapled to the project’s sickly flesh, little left of the beginnings of the project which seems to have occupied the nastiest and bleakest corners of Maurice’s attentions for well over a decade.

‘I Speak The Truth, Yet With Every Word Uttered, Thousands Die’ strips away black metal’s layers of traditional musicality to reveal an impassive industrial inside, dominated by blocks of cold sound which have been deprived of melody to instead comprise a set of negatively charged drones owing more to the fringes of European postmortem industrial than its church burning miscreants, then sets in largely short-form compositions which share a dismal production robbed of frequency definition and often constrained from the strangled recordings into which Maurice places his textural aberrations.

Despite Gnaw Their Tongues’ rejection of musicality, percussion is an usual driver of ‘I Speak The truth, Yet With every Word Uttered, Thousands Die’; devoid of melodic form, its drone layers clutch at the trajectory given by the pieces’ rhythmic constructs. The burrowing insect slop which opens the title track, leading into a brief martial industrial refrain and more larval electronics layers, begins to writhe as sparse programmed percussion punches through its murky electronics – reducing its bass guitar to a mucousy substance which bulges as the percussive stabs jab it. Likewise “Purity Coffins” alternates its hellish windstorms with punctuations of tense electronics twitching at the provocation of its electronic drum flashes, the piece almost dramatic in its soundtrack-like percussive hits and orchestra-like swells of permeating sound, and “Abortion Hymn” rides free-form percussion into a storm of reverberated industrial spatter, bass guitar murmur and swampy vocal cries: only a few tentacles of mid-range slither emerge from the depressive mass of sound separately, to warily grasp around and retreat unsatisfied.

Other rhythmic constructs follow the turgid pull of the LP’s familiarly hateful textures, beginning with “White Void Black Wounds” commandeering a blast beat to then requisition it as a tool of war, as a frantic spray of artillery merges with seething distortion textures. The harrowing screams of “Here Is No Corruption” are only unleashed when its quaver drum pattern pauses to allow strains of vocals scrapings to emerge from the moist drone which blankets the track, its subtle pattern changes swamped by the clamouring spawn of the piece’s synth lines. Gnaw Their Tongues has never lurched closer to power electronics than in these moments of insistence, textures caught in the churn and seething in frustration as harrowing vocals whirlpool through the pieces.

While not afraid to borrow from the black industrial setups of MZ.412 and the drone-heavy suffocations of Urfaust, Gnaw Their Tongues brings a newly abstracted darkness to what remains, again somehow shaped by its percussive elements. “To Rival Death In Beauty” begins with grotesque vocals and a marauding synth line but is taken away by intermittent fragmentation of electronica rhythmic constructs, the piece managing to move its heaving carcass in time with the pulse set in motion by those early drum machine patterns. Even more absurd, a noirish wash permeates “A Sombre Gesture In The Faint Light Of Dusk” as faltering error messages and an unsettling bass refrain flare into more swollen pustules of greying drone mush, squirming electronics and dripping vocal screams – its urgencies dictated by the return of its percussive elements, as with closer “Shall Be No More” which ebbs and flows as tied to its rhythmic fortunes.

After half an hour of unpleasantness which plumbs the depths of Maurice’s late night self-torment, reflected in a constantly dismal production which has been stripped of any high end presence, “Shall Be No More” finally settles into ‘I Speak The Truth, Yet With Every Word Uttered, Thousands Die’’s brief moment of normalcy. Weak rays of sun reach the later half of the track  to reveal an almost uplifting (at least comparable to the remainder of ‘I Speak The Truth, Yet With Every Word Uttered, Thousands Die’) melody which brings the nightmarishness of the album to a close – as if acknowledging that the LP’s terrors must lurk in both literal and mentally figurative shadows, to be forgotten in the light of day but crawling back into consciousness when the evening arrives.

My initial listens to ‘I Speak The Truth, Yet With Every Word Uttered, Thousands Die’ thought that perhaps the project had spat out a release too reliant on the emotionless distortion textures which shadow much of the LP, but the shaping of ‘I Speak The Truth, Yet With Every Word Uttered, Thousands Die’ is a more complex ordeal than that initial impression, its grotesqueness worsened when you realise that even within that putrid production its parts are connected, and that mess is alive and responsive. Gnaw Their Tongues has picked at the rotted flesh of industrial culture for years, but ‘I Speak The Truth, Yet With Every Word Uttered, Thousands Die’ seems enraptured by the genre’s dark recesses, even as Maurice’s other projects pull threads of more familiar black metal out for focus. Earlier pleasure derived from the chaos and paraphilic pulls of power electronics has failed, leaving only the genre’s bleakest focuses with which to construct this album.

https://gnawtheirtongues.bandcamp.com/album/i-speak-the-truth-yet-with-every-word-uttered-thousands-die