TEEN ACTION RECORDS was nice enough to send a mass of audio for me to review.
AL QUEDA / DEMONOLOGISTS c9
A shiny silver cassette comes in standard jewel case with xeroxed artwork.
AL QUEDA starts their side with a sluggish beat, before all hell breaks loose. Wild guitar, hideous vocals, and the same blown out beat, along with huge amounts of white noise. The track cuts suddenly and another starts. It is soon evident that their side contains several short tracks. The second track begins with a rock riff that slowly is buried under piles of HNW static. It is immediately followed by a looping rumbling noise, a reverberated guitar loop, and metal pulsing and scraping as the third track. The fourth track is cut up screaming, metal chugging and buried drums, metal screeching and looping, whole track seems like one big loop. The last track contains beautiful looping ambience, squirming tadpole glitching laid overtop. The ambience fades and the glitching continues. Each track seems like a preview for something greater. Ideas and thoughts sketched out. It would have been nice to hear the continuation of ONE of these tracks on the cassette that took up the entire 4.5 minute duration, but the schizophrenic noisecore blast quality is nice, especially out of the context of noisecore.
DEMONOLISTS side starts with high pitched pulsating hissing that starts to blur and gain more low end, evolving into a more chunky, HNW style wall. It gains an almost scraping-like high pitched static blast over top of the wall, which now sounds like the pulse from a dying cassette recorder. The wall marches on, grainy, but gains what sounds to be an almost hallow quality to it- a father away feedback sound that isn't as close as the static is in the forefront, that drones away as the wall crunches and burns. The wall gains sub-bass that compresses the sound of the track and creates even more tension. Somehow DEMONOLOGISTS have created a blackened wall of torture that fades into nothing.
5/5, a very interesting listen
ALLEIN LUDDITE Untitled c40
Sweet black latex packaging holds small xeroxed insert and black cassette.
Side A begins with what sounds like the failed inflation of a balloon in a tight chamber. The struggle to blow up the balloon, the squeak of pressed lips, the shrill and frequency of saliva blowing, that begins to crackle as the blowing intensifies. Slowly the sounds seem as if they are coming from both above and below water, the blowing still heard, but the pulse and pop of bubbles from below greatly present. The blowing becomes almost rhythmic, turning from the squeaking of lips to the squeaking of a voice. The bubbles become greater and of more volume, their popping becoming more and more important.
The next track sounds like junk guitar and the tapping of metal. It then turns into a more junk-oriented affair, the scraping sounds like multiple items upon the guitar. It then moves into an almost bow-like sound moving back and forth across the strings, to the point of what sounds like almost breaking. The guitar sounds like it actually gets turned ON and plugged in, the E string down-tuned, being bowed, while more junk is being tossed and thrown and rubbed against the guitar. The guitar drones low and full of bass, the junk calms. The junk stops and the guitar droning gets deeper and more concentrated, it sounds like a fat synthesizer.
The B-Side starts with more junk sounds, piling on top of each other. The tension of strings is heard overtop all of the junk. It continues on and generally sounds like the two previous guitar tracks.
The next track picks up in a similar vein to the first track, but instead of bubbles scraping and screeching. The tense scurrying fades and turns into longer drawn out drones that begin to gradually get more and more choppy. There is a dichotomy between lower bowel drones and high static-driven blown out scraping.
A wide atmosphere and metal on metal taping with long echo trails is found on the following track. This is by far the most moody of the improvisations, a hostile bare environment where every detail is important. The hits die down for a short period, before coming back, closer, with longer reverb trails sending the listener deeper into the abyss. The tapping becomes faster, the droning ceases, and a sort of faux-rhythm is formed with the frequency of the beats, before fading.
I find the cassette to be a little drawn out, and some of the tracks drag on for just long enough to become trite. Some decent concepts float about on the cassette, and the final track on the B side (Metal Sheets) seems to be the most (seemingly) thought out of the pieces.
2/5
