Yeah, the music again… The torrent never ceases, it flows, flooding my room with cds and dark ambience… There’s no light in the end of this tunnel… This time I’ve got 5 CDs of the north american experimental music. American music is quite rare in my collection, dunno why but there are not much good american artists for me. I’ll use quotes from the project’s sites because I just don’t want to type what’s written already if I’m agreed with that. Anyway, here we go:
Aesthetic Meat Front – “Embalmer Tapes (dissected)” – dronenoise from the masochistic extremists. Released on italian Old Europa Cafe this album is rather nice actually: noiseloops, industrial feel and “eerie soundscape of post-mortem ambience”. It’s no wonder considering that R|A|A|N participated there as sound manipulator. “Those 68 minutes were the sole sound source for Embalmer Tapes, Louis Fleischauer together with R|A|A|N dissected, sliced and reconstructed this recording into an eerie soundscape of post-mortem ambience. Embalmer Tapes is a sonique exploration of cold flesh. By only using sounds from the original embalming tape, AMF captured the unsettling atmosphere of the prep-room. Let the dead not be forgotten, may they live amongst us through sonic energy. “There is only hope in Oblivion, Oblivion, Oblivion …”
Second CD is split Bargain Basement/Wilt – “Flea Market/1958”. The first 30 min track is by Bargain Basement and it’s some weird collage of sounds, i didn’t like it much. It’s something chaotic and weird with alot of field and radio recordings. “Bargain basement takes an assortment of ordinary sounds from day to day life, and mixes them together to create a surreal soundtrack to places unknown. Wilt uses a collection of both natural, found sounds, and electronic manipulation to create a dark, drifting, and dream like soundscapes.” Wilt’s part is a bit better, there are as ambient as industrial tracks. Not top, but okish stuff.
Third CD is Gruntsplatter – “The Death Fires”. Well, I’ve found this project browsing Crionic Mind records site year ago, was interested by the samples and ordered three cds. This is good drone noise. Nothing special about it, some tracks create rather nice desolate atmosphere though. I like this kind of quiet harsh noise where you can drift away to some gloomy postapocalyptic landscape. “Soot choked atmospherics, splintered frequencies & rhythmic subtlty gurgle in rotten sockets and drift down untouched crevasses in the stale earth to a primal place of instinctual violence and visceral fear, where intellect is abandoned in the face of a saturating unknown.”
Fourth CD is split of Gruntsplatter/Slowvent non-creatively entitled “Split Release”. “By combining elements of of Death Industrial, Harsh/Noise Ambient, rhythmic undercurrents and pitch-shifted experimentation, he creates a powerful mix of both the abrasive and atmospheric. The sluggish soundscapes and low end distortions move like the grinding of tectonic plates… like boiling pitch, Slowvent generates thick, viscous, malleable visions of the obscure that gurgle and lick at something far deeper than your eardrums.”
And fifth and the last is from the same Crionic Mind label: Never Presence Forever – “Disturbed Visceral Nociception”. “It is an outstanding collection of bleak soundscapes, crytpic minimalism and dark noise. Rich textural drifts and detailed craftsmanship give this release a enveloping penetration and depth.”
Well, summing the last 4 cds up which are the part of one gang, I’d say that they’re quite similar by the nature and sound in general. There are differencies of course. Alignments to various substyles, but there’s one common basement for them all, low fi noise and loops. Some artists use field recordings and some light sounding instruments to add some additional feel to the music, but the atmosphere is pretty similar. It’s hard to describe this more precisely, well, it’s like some people distinguish swedish death metal sound from the Florida death metal. I hope you understand what I mean. This is american sound. I woudn’t add to this bunch Aesthetic Meat Front though, this one has more sinister and ritualistic feel with secret meaning tied to it, hence I like it better.