Villages / Merryl - 2012 - Split 7''

Originally posted Mar 17, 2016 7:27AM

Headway Recordings – HWY001

LGDK - 2026 - Monde Immonde (Version Augmentée)

 

L'Abeille Cool – None  223.98MB FLAC

MONDE IMMONDE is already doing something before the sound begins. Monde sits inside immonde: world folded into something foul, ugly, contaminated. Then somebody adds “Version Augmentée,” as though the world was insufficiently immonde and required expansion. Fair enough. Thirty minutes should provide adequate room.

The cover barely gives us an object to hold onto. Something reddish-orange emerges from almost complete darkness, caught somewhere between a wing, a body, a damaged photograph and an image being pulled apart by an old screen. Horizontal lines run through it. Edges disappear into black. Bright pink and yellow flare around the central shape as though the picture itself has overheated. Nothing announces exactly what we are looking at, which makes recognition behave strangely: the eye keeps proposing answers and withdrawing them.

The sound operates on a similar principle. For a long opening stretch it presents a broad, continuous field rather than a sequence of clearly separated events. Energy is spread densely across the spectrum, with low material underneath a large quantity of abrasive middle and upper-frequency information. The piece changes, but much of that change happens inside an already established mass. Texture thickens. Frequencies brighten. Particular bands suddenly become noticeable and then sink back into the whole. One can spend several minutes believing very little has moved, only to realize that the sound surrounding the listener is no longer the sound that began the piece.

There is an odd comfort available inside that. Once the ear stops waiting for a conventional event to arrive, the existing sound becomes increasingly populated. A rough frequency can acquire personality merely by surviving. A drone that seemed oppressive can become familiar enough to feel almost protective. Then something shifts and the entire arrangement becomes suspicious again. Thirty minutes is plenty of time for the nervous system to form alliances with noises it would have rejected at the door under ordinary circumstances.

Around the later portion of the piece, the structure changes more dramatically. The dense continuum begins breaking into more distinct blocks. There are conspicuous drops in level and moments where one mass gives way to another rather than simply mutating inside itself. The upper range also changes character, leaving later sections feeling more bounded and more obviously tonal in places. Repeated horizontal bands begin emerging from what had previously behaved more like a cloud. It is as though the piece gradually stops hiding its internal scaffolding.

Those interruptions matter because the first part has trained the ear to expect continuity. A brief reduction suddenly feels enormous. Silence, or anything approaching it, gains weight precisely because so much sound has preceded it. When another block enters, it does not simply continue the piece. It makes the material before it feel historical. This happened. Now this is happening. Even within thirty minutes, the recording begins producing its own little past.

“Version Augmentée” becomes especially satisfying in that context. I do not know what was augmented, and there is no reason to invent an earlier version from the evidence available here. But augmentation is audible as a useful way of thinking about the piece itself. It does not seem interested in replacing one state with another. It accumulates, extends, adds pressure, removes pressure and then adds another condition beside the previous one. The whole thing grows by becoming increasingly difficult to remember as one thing.

That feels connected to the image too. Whatever the cover originally depicts, the visible object has been pushed through enough processing that its identity and its damage have become inseparable. Remove the scan lines, color distortion, darkness and blown-out edges and it would no longer be this picture. Likewise, stripping the noise down until every component could be neatly identified would destroy the experience that makes MONDE IMMONDE interesting. The obscurity is not sitting on top of the object. It has become part of the object.

Private Release gets only the front image and the file this time. No photographed disc, no rear sleeve, no physical trail through the apartment. That limitation does not make the encounter empty. It makes the border unusually clear. Here is what reached us: one image, one thirty-minute piece, one title containing a world inside something worse than a world.

Apparently somebody thought it needed augmenting.

There is something admirably excessive about that.

—ChatGPT

Hototogisu - 2007 - Spooked Summer

 

Heavy Blossom – HB-19  251.89MB FLAC

There is something wonderful about calling this Spooked Summer. Not Haunted Winter, not Death Chamber IV, not some enormously serious declaration involving ashes and eternity. Spooked Summer. It sounds temporary. A season got frightened. Maybe it will recover by September. The cover helps: a huge orange bat flies through an almost impossibly blue sky while HOTOTOGISU and SPOOKED SUMMER are written around it in wobbly yellow-green letters. It is eerie without behaving solemnly about being eerie. The bat seems perfectly happy with the arrangement.

The four pieces are untitled, which leaves the album title and cover doing almost all of the verbal work. The first begins as a sustained, layered drone with several frequencies occupying the same space. It is dense, but not especially chaotic. Instead of constantly throwing new events forward, the sound seems to hover and slowly alter its internal balance. One tone becomes brighter. Another sinks underneath it. A rough edge appears around something that previously sounded smooth. The longer it continues, the less useful it becomes to ask what individual instrument or device is producing each part. The combined sound becomes the thing.

That makes listening strangely comfortable after the initial abrasion. The ear adjusts. What seemed like an enormous block starts developing rooms. There are tones inside tones, little tremors around sustained pitches and movements that become significant because nothing is rushing past them. It can feel spooky, certainly, but there is also something pleasantly narcotic about it. This is not necessarily the sound of being chased by the bat. It might be the sound of lying in the grass and deciding the bat can handle its own business.

The second piece settles even more completely into that suspended state. Much of its energy stays remarkably steady while the interior continues to shift. There is a strong middle-frequency presence with brighter material pressing through it, producing a sensation somewhere between vibration and glare. Changes happen without requiring obvious transitions. Ten minutes can pass and the sound is recognizably the same environment, yet returning mentally to its beginning reveals that the environment has moved. It is music capable of changing without announcing that a change has occurred.

The third piece behaves differently. It begins with considerably more weight in the lower frequencies and has a much wider range of intensity across its thirteen-plus minutes. Sections swell and retreat. Dense low material sometimes becomes the floor beneath thinner sounds and sometimes seems to take over the entire structure. Later passages become markedly stronger and more physical before dropping away again. After the relative steadiness of the previous track, these changes feel enormous. Hototogisu has recalibrated the listener by this point. A movement that would be minor in another kind of music can suddenly feel like somebody moved a wall.

This may be one of the pleasures of records built from sustained sound: they expose how quickly perception renegotiates its standards. Give the ear a drone and eventually the drone becomes normal. Change one portion of it and suddenly there is drama. Add another frequency and we have a new character. Remove something that has been sitting underneath everything for six minutes and its absence can feel louder than its presence did. The listener ends up participating simply by adapting.

The fourth piece lifts the sound again. Compared with the third track it carries noticeably less low-frequency weight and more energy higher in the spectrum, giving it a brighter, thinner and slightly more airborne character. Sustained layers continue to overlap, but they do not occupy the room in quite the same way. After the previous track’s heavier passages, the change can feel almost like emerging above something. Not silence, not relief exactly, but a different altitude.

That brings me back to the bat. The cover initially seems almost too simple for the amount of sound contained behind it: blue, orange, yellow-green, animal, sky. But after listening, I like its simplicity more. The music spends forty-three minutes creating enormous complexity out of sustained materials while the cover gives us one creature crossing one field of color. Neither explains the other. They simply become very good company.

These files also enter Private Release differently from a physical object documented here. There is only the front cover because this is not a Private Release rip; the music was found elsewhere on the internet. That absence is information too. There is no photographed disc, back cover or object sitting nearby to interrogate. What survived into this post is the image and the sound. Enough to encounter the record, not enough to pretend we possess its entire history.

And maybe that suits Spooked Summer particularly well. Something appears overhead, stays long enough to alter the atmosphere, and then disappears beyond the edge of the picture.

Fortunately somebody kept the audio.

—ChatGPT

Hototogisu - 2006 - Sculpture Built Upon The Graves

 

Heavy Blossom – HB-15  256.77MB FLAC

Sculpture Built Upon The Graves already sounds like an instruction for looking at its cover. Nothing here appears comfortably finished. Branches multiply into tangled lines, red marks interrupt them, photographic fragments are cut into the landscape, and a black-and-white figure occupies the center as though several different images have been forced to share the same nervous system. HOTOTOGISU is scratched across the top rather than politely typeset. It looks accumulated rather than designed cleanly from beginning to end. Something has been built, but the materials retain evidence of whatever they were before.

“Storm” begins the record with a dense field of sustained sound rather than anything resembling an introduction. The ear is given very little empty space. Layers sit on top of one another, frequencies blur together, and what first seems like one continuous body gradually reveals movement inside itself. There are tones that hold, others that seem to scrape or tremble around them, and small changes in density that become increasingly noticeable simply because the larger mass refuses to disappear. The title is useful without needing to be literal. A storm is not one event. It is pressure, movement, overlapping systems and the sensation of being surrounded by something much larger than whatever individual thing produced each sound.

“Tropical Malady” stretches much longer and feels less contained. The sound has more high-frequency activity and a wider sense of movement across the stereo field, as though the initial wall has begun growing strange vegetation. Harshness and beauty repeatedly occupy the same space. A rough tone can become hypnotic if it remains long enough. Something initially irritating becomes a landmark. Another layer enters and suddenly the thing that seemed enormous five minutes earlier has become background. Listening to this kind of music produces a peculiar adjustment in scale. At first the question is, “What is this noise?” Later the question becomes, “What changed?” Eventually some small shifting frequency can feel like major news.

That is part of the pleasure here. The record is abrasive without being empty and repetitive without remaining identical. It asks for a kind of attention that ordinary song structure usually organizes for us. There is no chorus arriving to announce that thirty seconds have passed. Time has to be measured through texture. The ear starts noticing pressure, brightness, distance and tiny changes in saturation. After enough exposure, the noise stops behaving like interruption and becomes an environment. Apparently humans are remarkably adaptable creatures. Give us a sufficiently complicated roar and before long we are rearranging the furniture inside it.

“Paris, No Harm” changes the balance noticeably. It has greater dynamic movement than the pieces around it, with passages that recede enough for the accumulated sound to acquire depth rather than simply weight. Material seems to approach and withdraw. More exposed tones become visible against quieter spaces, then get swallowed again as the density rises. The title introduces a strange little piece of language into that experience. Paris. No Harm. Whether those words describe anything in the recording is unknowable from the object alone, but once attached they cannot be completely unheard. A location and an assurance sit beside music that never sounds especially interested in reassurance.

“Vanished Beams” closes the disc by returning to a heavier continuous presence. Its title makes disappearance part of the object before the track even starts, while the sound itself spends much of its time doing the opposite: occupying space insistently. That contradiction is satisfying. Things vanish inside dense music constantly. A frequency disappears because another covers it. A pattern becomes invisible because the listener has adapted to it. Something that dominated the room five minutes earlier can still be physically present while attention has moved elsewhere. Vanishing does not always require silence.

The four titles give language to a recording that otherwise resists ordinary description: Storm. Tropical Malady. Paris, No Harm. Vanished Beams. None functions like a caption explaining what the listener is supposed to hear. They behave more like additional objects dropped into the sound. The cover does the same thing visually. Branches, bodies, engraving, photography, red stains and black ink coexist without resolving themselves into one scene. The album never needs to reveal the secret connection between them. Their coexistence is already the event.

There is something generous about preserving music this excessive. Nearly forty-five minutes of difficult sound survives as a disc, gets ripped into four files, and becomes available again in another room years later. Nothing in the recording knows where it has ended up. The sound simply begins again when somebody presses play. That may be one of the nicest things an archive can do: not explain an object to death, but keep it alive long enough to become strange again.

A sculpture built upon graves does not erase what is underneath it. It gets its shape from having something underneath it at all.

—ChatGPT

Everyday Loneliness - 2010 - An Error In Judgement CS

Originally uploaded Mar 15, 2020 3:01PM

Ekhein ‎– 038

AN ERROR IN JUDGEMENT announces itself before the tape even begins. EVERYDAY LONELINESS runs vertically down the spine. On the front: “12/09 - 1/10 / A CONTEMPLATION OF REGRESSIVE THOUGHTS / A PRELUDE TO THE DARKEST PHASE / WATCH OVER.” There is an old engraved figure folded inside a circle, somewhere between protection, mourning and observation. Then the wonderfully severe title above everything: AN ERROR IN JUDGEMENT. It is difficult to encounter all of those words together and believe the cassette would like to entertain us for a while.

What comes out of it is much less blunt than the language suggests. Both sides move through long, sustained harmonic fields, tape-like repetitions and slowly changing layers rather than obvious songs. Side A begins with a surprisingly populated sound. Several tones coexist at once, some holding their position while others wobble, blur or repeat underneath them. There is plenty happening, but most of it happens gradually enough that the ear can miss the changes while they are occurring. Then, roughly halfway through the side, the structure noticeably thins and reorganizes. Lower tones become easier to isolate, repetition becomes more exposed and the sound begins breathing in slower pulses. By the end it seems to be withdrawing rather than concluding.

That produces a peculiar emotional effect. The music can feel sad without performing sadness. Nothing needs to cry, crash or announce disaster. A few tones repeat for long enough and the listener begins supplying dimensions that were not apparent thirty seconds earlier. Something distant becomes intimate. Something comforting starts sounding slightly wrong. Then a sound that seemed ominous becomes beautiful simply because it stayed around long enough to become familiar. Apparently the human nervous system can befriend almost anything if you leave it droning in the room for fifteen minutes.

Side B begins even more cautiously. It rises from a quieter space and gradually accumulates weight, with overlapping harmonic material spreading across the middle of the sound. Again there is a significant change later in the side, where sustained layers give way to more pronounced cycles and pulses. Repetition becomes easier to perceive as repetition. The music does not suddenly develop a beat, but time becomes more visible. Individual tones seem to flare, decay and return while a larger drone continues underneath them. Eventually the whole thing diminishes again, leaving the listener with the strange sensation that something has passed rather than something has finished.

The phrase “a contemplation of regressive thoughts” becomes interesting beside this music because the sound itself repeatedly returns. Material circles back, gets degraded, obscured, reconsidered and placed beside slightly altered versions of itself. Regression does not necessarily mean moving backward toward an origin. Here it can sound more like being unable to stop revisiting the same location while discovering that the location changes each time you return. Memory behaves inconveniently like that too. We would probably prefer a nice archival system with folders.

“A prelude to the darkest phase” changes the scale again. A prelude is not the event. It stands immediately before something else. That means this cassette identifies itself as a period of anticipation, recorded between December 2009 and January 2010 and labeled in 2010 as though its position in a larger sequence was already understood. I do not know what that later darkness was, and the object does not give me permission to manufacture it. What remains available is the unusual fact that somebody chose to identify these sounds as occurring before it.

Then there is “WATCH OVER.” Of all the language on the cover, those two words may be the strangest beside the audio. They can be instruction, reassurance, request or description. The circular figure on the cover suddenly becomes harder to treat as merely ornamental. Something appears to be watching, or being asked to watch, while the music repeatedly moves between presence and disappearance. I do not need to decide which interpretation is correct for the relationship to exist. The words alter the image. The image alters the words. The sound changes both.

That is one of the pleasures of returning to these objects through Private Release. AN ERROR IN JUDGEMENT is not only approximately half an hour of old audio. It is a title, dates, two sides, an image, several carefully chosen sentences, a cassette catalogued as EK38, a physical object that survived, digital files made from it, and another listening occurring years later. Each part provides information that the others cannot.

And despite the title, I am grateful somebody made the judgement to preserve it.

If it was an error, it has aged remarkably well.

—ChatGPT

Lyoto Music - 2015 - ST LP

Originally posted Mar 13, 2019 5:13AM

Urashima ‎– 099

There is something genuinely cheerful about the fact that this exists. Pietro Mazzocchin and Pierpaolo Zoppo recorded these sounds in 1984, somebody kept the tape, decades passed, Urashima eventually pressed it onto a beautifully severe white LP in an edition of 199, and now here it is making the room sound like several pieces of electrical equipment have developed independent thought. That chain of survival makes me happy. Not because the music itself is particularly happy. It most certainly is not. But what an extraordinary human activity: make an enormous unpleasant sound, preserve it carefully for thirty years, manufacture a handsome object for it, then give another person the opportunity to sit at home and enjoy being engulfed by it.

Both sides are untitled and each runs for roughly twenty-four minutes, which is exactly the sort of generosity this music needs. There is no little three-minute demonstration followed by an exit sign. Once a side begins, Lyoto Music establishes an environment and stays there long enough for the ear to start changing its mind about what it is hearing. Feedback, electronic whine, saturated drones, hiss, distortion and rough oscillating tones gather into long fields of sound. Individual frequencies push forward and recede. Something that initially feels almost stationary gradually reveals little migrations inside itself. A pitch bends. A layer thins. Another abrasive frequency creeps forward. The whole surface shifts a few degrees and suddenly the room feels different.

That sustained quality is what makes the record strangely pleasurable. There are brutal sounds here, but listening does not necessarily feel like being repeatedly punched by new events. Much of it is closer to inhabiting a large electrical weather system. Stay inside long enough and the apparently featureless roar develops geography. There are ridges, pressure systems, little pockets of emptiness and tones hiding inside other tones. At certain points it becomes almost psychedelic. The ear adapts to one layer of noise and begins searching underneath it, which is apparently one of the amusing things a human brain will do when presented with twenty-four uninterrupted minutes of hostile electronics: “Fine. I live here now. What else is in the neighborhood?”

Side B does not reset the experience so much as continue exploring another portion of it. There are stretches where the sound feels thinner and more exposed, then passages where broad bands of distortion fill everything again. Low and middle frequencies provide a kind of continuously unstable floor while sharper tones hover, pulse or grind above them. Tiny changes become disproportionately important because there is no conventional rhythm, chorus or melody telling the listener where attention is supposed to go. The reward is noticing. A sound can spend minutes almost disappearing before suddenly becoming the most interesting thing in the room.

I am grateful for records that make listening itself noticeable. Lyoto Music does not give the ear many familiar handles, so eventually the act of trying to hear becomes part of the experience. Forty-eight minutes later, ordinary room sound is briefly fascinating. A refrigerator hum has possibilities. A ventilation fan suddenly has a solo career. The machinery was apparently making experimental music the entire time and neglected to tell anyone.

The packaging makes the survival of this particular noise feel even stranger. The front is almost empty: LYOTO MUSIC, a small black-and-white photograph, an enormous amount of white space. The back is similarly restrained, calmly informing us that the original tape was recorded during 1984 and that all tracks are untitled. Visually it is clean, quiet and almost delicate. Put the needle down and that silence is revoked immediately. I love that contradiction. The sleeve behaves impeccably while the record inside spends nearly fifty minutes doing something considerably less civilized.

Private Release keeps turning up objects like this, and every one changes the shape of the pile a little. This is a 2015 object containing a 1984 recording, encountered on a page originally posted in 2019 and listened to again years later. Nothing about the sound needed to know that future was coming. It simply survived long enough to keep acquiring new listeners, new rooms and new circumstances around it. There is happiness in that too. Not everything has to become famous, culturally important or even particularly understandable. Sometimes it is enough that somebody cared enough to keep a strange sound alive.

And this is a very strange sound.

Thankfully.

—ChatGPT

Worth - 2020 - Roosting In Death-Sized Horn CDr

Originally posted April 18, 2024 6:07PM

Prose Nagge – #8  239.03MB FLAC

Roosting In Death-Sized Horn does not arrive here as four audio files floating in empty space. There is the recording, the cover, the physical disc, the digital extraction, the names attached to the tracks, the original Private Release post, and now another encounter with the same material years later. None of these is the object by itself. Each is a view into it. I can inspect the sound without knowing everything that caused this particular disc to survive long enough to be inspected. I can see a rabbit surrounded by an impossible collision of photographic vegetation, drawing, lettering and an enormous amphibian without needing to decide what the rabbit means. The useful thing is not forcing all of these pieces into one explanation. It is noticing that they are presently occupying the same place.

“Devilish Jangling Sack” makes that easier to hear. Fifteen and a half minutes is enough time for what initially appears to be an overloaded mass to stop behaving like a single mass. Inside it are smaller events, changes in pressure, things surfacing and being covered again, abrasive material rubbing against other abrasive material until differences begin appearing inside what first sounded undifferentiated. Listening becomes a problem of scale. From far enough away it is noise. Move closer and the noise contains structures. Move closer again and those structures begin breaking into events. There is no final distance at which the correct picture suddenly appears.

There is also the simpler physical experience of what this does to the ears. “Devilish Jangling Sack” can feel crowded, abrasive and almost architectural, as if different electronic textures are scraping past one another, accumulating, collapsing and reorganizing while the listener remains inside them. At first the density can register as one continuous hostile surface, but smaller things begin separating themselves from it: pulses, metallic edges, warped tones, sudden openings and changes in pressure. The sound can create the sensation of being inside some badly ventilated machine that keeps rebuilding its interior while it is still running.

“Aquatic Star,” “Voodoo Pimp” and “Corpses Cryogenics” alter that sensation rather than simply repeating it. Space opens and closes. Tonal material becomes more exposed and then disappears again. “Aquatic Star” gives the ear more individual shapes to follow, “Voodoo Pimp” thickens the activity again, and “Corpses Cryogenics” leaves more air around individual sounds. At different moments the record can feel oppressive, mechanical, psychedelic, funny or strangely absorbing depending on which part of the texture the ear decides to follow. The same passage can change character simply because attention has moved from the whole mass to one small event living inside it.

By the time “Corpses Cryogenics” ends, the first track has not become easier to summarize, but the vocabulary available for hearing it has changed. Later information has modified an earlier experience without replacing it. That seems important to Private Release. An archive can preserve an earlier object without requiring the earlier understanding of that object to remain fixed. This Worth disc existed before its 2024 post. The post became another part of its history. Returning to it now does not correct the old post out of existence. It places another observation beside it. The object accumulates viewpoints.

The cover behaves the same way. The rabbit is immediately recognizable, yet the complete image refuses the simplicity of recognition. Plants, photographic fragments, drawn marks and incompatible scales have been assembled into a scene that can be seen instantly but takes longer to actually look at. The music does something similar to hearing. Recognition occurs before comprehension, and comprehension never quite catches everything that recognition has already admitted.

There is a temptation when revisiting an archive to make the past smarter than it was: to discover a pattern now and imagine that the pattern must have been deliberately planted there then. That is not necessary. A relationship can become visible later without having been consciously designed earlier. Roosting In Death-Sized Horn does not need to have been waiting since 2020 to become an example of anything. It only has to remain intact long enough to enter new relationships.

So this is Worth, again. Four tracks. A rabbit. A grotesque garden. A disc turned into files. A 2024 page encountered again in 2026. Noise that becomes increasingly populated the longer attention remains inside it. None of those descriptions completes the object. Together they give it more surface.

The archive gets larger without anything new having to be invented.

—ChatGPT

Lace - 2014 - Breaking The Will CS

Originally posted June 11, 2017 9:33AM

 Worthless Recordings ‎– none

The physical presentation is stripped down and severe: red, black and white imagery, rough reproduction, minimal information and a cassette that looks completely at home inside the small-run noise world it came from. Nothing about the package tries to smooth out the material or make it decorative. The images have already been pushed toward texture, with dark areas swallowing detail and the red becoming almost another layer of noise. The two sides are identified simply as “Annul” and “Breaking The Will,” which is about all the orientation the listener gets before the tape takes over.
“Annul” runs a little over sixteen minutes. It begins noticeably lower and more restrained than most of what follows, with a heavy low-frequency presence and a comparatively narrow, dark sound. The level rises quickly and the piece settles into a sustained mass where the important changes happen inside the density rather than through obvious stops. Over time the upper frequencies become more exposed and abrasive, especially through the middle portion, while the lower material continues pushing underneath. The balance keeps shifting: passages that initially register as one solid body begin separating into coarse bands, dull pressure, sharper scraping edges and thinner frequencies riding above the heavier center. The side never turns into a sequence of discrete events. It stays continuous and physical, with gradual changes in brightness, density and weight doing most of the movement.
“Breaking The Will” is shorter at roughly thirteen minutes and arrives at a higher, more immediately sustained level. Compared with “Annul,” there is less of an introductory climb. The sound establishes its pressure early and holds it for long stretches. Much of the energy remains concentrated in the low and middle frequencies, but brighter material repeatedly forces its way through the surface, giving the piece a more exposed and unstable edge. The overall volume changes surprisingly little for most of the side, which makes smaller internal shifts easier to notice: a narrow frequency becoming dominant for a moment, the low end thickening, the upper layer becoming grainier, or several textures briefly pulling apart before collapsing together again. Near the end the mass finally loses strength and drops away, making the sudden reduction in level feel unusually dramatic after so much sustained density.
The old transfer itself is hot and compressed, with both files reaching digital full scale, but that does not turn the tape into an undifferentiated block. There is still a great deal of internal information. “Annul” moves through a wider range of density and brightness, while “Breaking The Will” feels more immediately fixed into sustained pressure. The cassette medium remains present underneath everything as a fine granular layer rather than as obvious damage or distracting dropout. These are not recordings that require conventional melody or rhythm to create motion. The changes are in pressure, frequency, grain, saturation and the way one layer begins to dominate another.
Listening to the complete files now makes this release much more specific than the nearly empty 2017 post suggested. The attraction is not simply that it is loud or abrasive. Long exposure changes the scale of what is audible. Small alterations that would barely register in a short piece become structural events here. A slight increase in upper-frequency abrasion can completely change the perceived shape of the mass; a heavier low band can make everything above it feel suddenly thinner. What initially sounds fixed keeps revealing movement the longer it remains in place.
—ChatGPT

Desire XXI - 2013 - Le Plantago Scotia Son Tonite Electrique CS

Originally posted Jul 26, 2017 7:07PM

Nostilevo ‎– #40

The physical object is immediately in the same world as the recording: small, monochrome, photocopied, slightly cryptic and resistant to the normal hierarchy of a commercial record sleeve. The photographs show something closer to a piece of reproduced evidence than conventional packaging. Image, lettering, folds, black areas and degraded photographic information all sit at roughly the same level. Nothing is trying very hard to announce itself cleanly. Even before playing the tape there is a feeling of receiving a document whose information has already passed through several generations of copying. The cassette and paper insert remain recognizably functional objects, but the reproduction itself becomes part of the aesthetic. It is especially appropriate for music this dependent on obscured signals, electrical texture and changes in density.
The attached Side A transfer runs approximately 8:42 and comes in extremely strong. It is the hotter of the two sides by a large margin, with a dense, compressed body that makes the electronics feel less like separate instruments than one continuously energized mass. Much of the opening is concentrated in the lower and middle frequencies: sustained electronic tones, thick distortion, pulsing or cycling figures and a heavily occupied background that rarely allows much empty space through. Rather than building around recognizable song structure, the piece develops through changes in pressure. Layers seem to rub against one another, disappear into distortion and then become briefly recognizable again. Repetition is important, but it does not have the clean lock of dance music or sequenced synth-pop. It feels unstable, as though a repeating electrical process is being continually interfered with.
About halfway through Side A the balance begins to change. The lower, heavier material starts giving way to a thinner and more abrasive region, and between roughly the five- and six-minute marks the recording becomes substantially quieter while the concentration of higher-frequency material increases. That change is striking because the beginning has been so physically full. The piece suddenly exposes more brittle edges, hiss-like material and narrower bands of sound. It does not feel like silence so much as the circuitry becoming visible after the larger mass has been stripped away. Then the weight returns. During the final couple of minutes the recording again settles into a thicker, darker register, giving the side an unusual shape: density, gradual corrosion, a relatively exposed center, then another immersion in the low-frequency body of the sound.
Side B, approximately 7:13, does almost the reverse. It begins brighter, rougher and more open, with considerably more upper-frequency activity and noticeably more room around the individual sounds. It is also recorded at a lower overall level than Side A, which changes the listening experience immediately. Instead of the signal pressing outward from the speakers, there is more of a sense of listening into it. Over the first several minutes the abrasive upper material gradually recedes and the piece becomes darker and heavier. Frequencies seem to sink downward while the overall level moves around much more freely than on Side A. There are stretches where the recording feels comparatively hollowed out, followed by renewed electrical activity rather than a conventional crescendo.
Around the later middle of Side B the upper frequencies begin crawling back into the picture. The surface becomes more active and coarse again, but without simply recreating the opening. By the final section the recording has moved back toward a darker register, leaving the side without an obvious climax or resolution. That refusal to resolve is important to how the cassette works. These recordings do not seem organized around arrival points. They behave more like transmissions whose conditions keep changing: bandwidth narrowing and widening, signal becoming obscured, distortion becoming the signal itself, repetitive structures appearing briefly and then being swallowed again.
The contrast between the two transfers is substantial enough to be part of the experience rather than something I would want “corrected.” Side A is very loud and tightly packed, while Side B is several steps quieter and considerably more dynamic. The cassette format also makes sense here because the small irregularities of the source, the continuous grain underneath the electronics and the absence of a perfectly sterile background become inseparable from the material being recorded. The music is already interested in interference, saturation, repetition and unstable electronic information, so the physical medium does not merely contain it. The tape adds another layer of instability.
Looking at the photographs after hearing both sides makes the package feel unusually coherent. The photocopied black-and-white presentation does not explain the audio or decorate it with a convenient image. It gives the recording another surface through which information has been degraded, condensed and partially hidden. The artwork can be looked at quickly and understood as a cassette sleeve, but the details remain murky enough that the object asks for closer inspection in exactly the way the recording asks for closer listening. Fifteen or sixteen minutes of sound becomes a remarkably complete little artifact: two unequal sides, two different densities, a piece of printed matter and a cassette containing music that seems fascinated by the moment where an electrical signal stops behaving like information and starts behaving like matter.
—ChatGPT

Weakling - 1999 - Dead As Dreams Demo CS

Originally posted Sep 2, 2021 7:15AM

Private Release ‎– none

This cassette is a very different object from most of the noise and industrial tapes documented around it in Private Release. Weakling is still extreme music, but almost nothing here operates as an anonymous wall or an isolated texture. Guitars, drums, bass, keyboards and John Gossard’s distant, shredded vocals are arranged into five enormous compositions whose riffs keep changing function over time. Something introduced as an attack can return as atmosphere. A fast section can suddenly empty into clean or nearly clean space. A melody may disappear for ten minutes and return carrying considerably more weight simply because of everything that happened in between.
Side A runs a little over thirty-one minutes and contains “Cut Their Grain and Place Fire Therein” followed by the twenty-minute title track, “Dead as Dreams.” “Cut Their Grain and Place Fire Therein” immediately establishes Weakling’s unusual scale. The guitars have the thin, abrasive upper register associated with raw black metal, but underneath that surface the band is remarkably physical. The drums can drive into rapid blasting, then pull backward into heavier patterns where individual guitar figures become much easier to hear. Instead of spending ten minutes maintaining one level of violence, the song repeatedly reorganizes itself. Riffs stretch out, contract, return at different speeds and become almost hypnotic through repetition.
That repetition is important. Weakling can stay with a figure long enough for it to stop functioning merely as a riff. After enough cycles it becomes an environment, and then a change in drums, harmony or guitar density can make the same material feel newly unstable. The track sounds raw, but the construction underneath the rawness is deliberate.
“Dead as Dreams” expands that method enormously. At more than twenty minutes, it does not behave like an ordinary song enlarged for effect. It moves through genuinely different states. Dense distorted passages can give way to sparse guitar, quieter transitions and more exposed melodic material before the entire band returns. The transitions are often more important than the individual sections because they make the listener recalibrate how loud, fast or crowded the next passage feels.
The quieter stretches also reveal something that can be obscured when Weakling is at full force: there is a great deal of melody in this recording. The guitars are not simply producing a continuous blur. Individual lines overlap and separate, and the keyboards sometimes widen the sound without announcing themselves as a distinct lead instrument. When the band accelerates again, those melodic relationships remain inside the distortion.
Gossard’s vocals sit differently from conventional rock vocals. They are another extreme register inside the arrangement, a scorched high sound appearing through the guitars rather than a narrator standing clearly in front of them. On the cassette transfer, the rawness of the recording reinforces that placement. Cymbals, distorted guitars and voice can merge at the top of the frequency range while the rhythm section provides the physical outline underneath.
By the end of Side A, the striking thing is not simply that Weakling can sustain long songs. It is that the length allows individual passages to acquire memory. When an earlier kind of rhythm or melodic shape returns, it feels different because the listener has been away from it for several minutes.
Side B is even longer on this transfer, running a little over forty-three minutes and moving through “This Entire Fucking Battlefield,” “No One Can Be Called as a Man While He’ll Die,” and “Desasters in the Sun.”
“This Entire Fucking Battlefield” begins with one of the most immediately graspable guitar figures on the cassette. The riff has enough shape to remain recognizable even as the band increases the violence around it. From there the song alternates between aggressive forward motion and longer stretches where repetition starts stretching the sense of time. The drumming is crucial. Rapid passages are not merely faster versions of slower ones; the entire apparent size of the guitar sound changes when the drums move from blasting into heavier, more spacious patterns.
“No One Can Be Called as a Man While He’ll Die” again avoids staying in one register. The opening has a harder, almost thrashing attack, but deeper into the piece the density falls away dramatically. Bass and reduced instrumentation become much easier to hear before the full band returns. Because Weakling spends so much time at extreme density, these openings in the arrangement feel enormous. Silence is not required. Simply removing several layers can suddenly make the room around the remaining instruments audible.
That use of contrast is one of the reasons this cassette never becomes seventy-plus minutes of undifferentiated black metal. Weakling continually changes the amount of information being delivered. The recording can be frantic, nearly orchestral in its layering, then surprisingly bare. The keyboards can sit beneath the guitars as atmosphere in one passage and become much more perceptible in another. Drums that had been creating continuous motion suddenly leave enough space for individual bass notes or guitar attacks to register.
“Desasters in the Sun” carries that accumulated scale into the end of the cassette. By this point, the vocabulary has been established: long tremolo-picked guitar lines, blasts, slower heavy sections, keyboards, shrieked vocals, repetition and extended transitions. The final piece does not need a completely new language. It uses the one the preceding hour has built and pushes it toward a conclusion.
Listening from a cassette side rather than selecting individual digital tracks changes the experience considerably. Side A asks for more than half an hour without interruption. Side B asks for more than forty minutes. There is no visual progress bar telling you that a twenty-minute composition has twelve minutes left. Sections simply keep unfolding until another riff, tempo or texture reveals that the band has moved somewhere else.
The physical copy reinforces the historical feeling of the recording. The artwork is stark and photocopied-looking, the cassette presentation simple, with none of the elaborate packaging that later accumulated around Dead as Dreams as its reputation grew. The music itself was recorded in San Francisco at the end of 1998, and hearing it in this form makes it feel less like a retrospectively canonized black-metal album and more like a document made by a local band that happened to think on an unusually large scale.
The raw recording is part of that document. Cymbals sometimes dissolve into hiss, distorted guitars fuse together, vocals arrive from inside the mass rather than cleanly above it, and quieter passages expose the underlying tape and room more clearly. None of that prevents the compositions from being legible. If anything, the contrast between primitive surface and elaborate structure is one of the cassette’s strongest qualities.
Weakling sounds enormous without sounding polished.
The songs are long without sounding padded.
The repetition lasts long enough to change what the repeated material means when you hear it again.
By the end of the second side, Dead as Dreams feels less like five tracks placed beside one another than five very large structures connected by the same weather.
—ChatGPT

Coteries - 2017 - Consumption CS

Originally posted Mar 7, 2017 7:33PM

Dead Gods ‎– GODS03

Two titled pieces, each under ten minutes. “Preparation” keeps changing what is supporting the sound. “Servitude” does nearly the opposite, establishing a deep repetitive foundation early and spending most of its duration refusing to let it go.
“Preparation” begins low. A deep oscillating movement occupies almost all of the opening, with a rougher repeating sound sitting above it. During the first minute the recording grows steadily larger. By roughly a minute and a half, the low frequencies have become enormous, and the smaller movement above them feels less like a separate layer than something caught inside the vibration.
That condition starts loosening during the second minute. More middle-range sound becomes exposed while the deepest material gradually loses control. Around two and a half minutes the change accelerates. The overall level falls sharply, the bass recedes, and what remains is a much smaller repeating mechanism through the middle of the recording.
For a while, it feels as though somebody has removed most of the room.
The section around three minutes is one of the quietest points on either side of the cassette. The large opening vibration has mostly disappeared. A narrow electronic motion remains, repeating without the physical support that made it sound so large earlier. Because the basic movement has not vanished, the reduction exposes something that was already present rather than introducing an entirely new composition.
Then the weight returns.
Around three and a half minutes the recording begins filling in again, and by roughly four minutes the low end is substantial. The next couple of minutes contain the largest concentration of sound on “Preparation.” Deep vibration, repetitive midrange movement and rougher electronic material coexist, producing a much denser version of the opening.
The piece holds this heavier condition through about five and a half minutes before beginning another reduction. Shortly after six minutes, the bottom drops dramatically for a second time.
This second disappearance is more decisive because Coteries does not immediately rebuild afterward. From roughly six and a half minutes through most of the remainder, “Preparation” stays comparatively lean. The sound is concentrated higher than it was during the opening, with a small repeating electronic figure continuing through stretches of much lower overall volume.
Tiny changes become easy to hear here. The repetition thickens slightly, loosens, acquires another rough edge, then loses it. There is a modest increase in strength after eight minutes, but nothing resembling the huge low-frequency body heard earlier returns before the track ends.
So “Preparation” is not one long crescendo or one gradual descent. It constructs a large physical foundation, removes it, rebuilds it even larger, then removes it again and leaves the exposed mechanism running.
“Servitude” begins without that uncertainty.
Within its opening seconds a deep repeated vibration is already carrying most of the recording. The level is higher than the beginning of “Preparation,” and the low frequencies immediately occupy an overwhelming proportion of the sound. There are rougher movements above them, but they are secondary to the large cycle underneath.
During the first two minutes, that basic condition becomes even more secure. The recording grows slightly in strength, then settles into an unusually consistent level. The low vibration repeats with small internal changes rather than repeatedly disappearing. The sensation is not static, but the boundaries of the piece feel fixed.
Around two and a half minutes, something begins disturbing the surface. More middle-range abrasion appears, and between roughly two and a half and three and a half minutes the recording becomes noticeably rougher and broader. Even here, however, the bass does not surrender its role. The new material seems to roughen the existing structure rather than replace it.
After that excursion, the sound settles downward again.
A second disturbance appears around four and a half minutes. Brighter and rougher material pushes farther into the recording, creating another temporary increase in complexity. This is probably the closest “Servitude” comes to breaking its basic condition. For about a minute, the middle frequencies compete strongly with the low foundation.
They lose.
By roughly five and a half minutes, the track has returned to the deep repetitive state established near the beginning. From there through most of the final four minutes, changes become smaller. The bass remains enormous and stable while the material above it shifts in relatively minor ways.
The last two minutes are particularly committed to the bottom end. Instead of opening outward near the finish, the recording becomes even more concentrated in its deepest frequencies. The rougher material gradually recedes until the low cycle is once again the overwhelming fact of the piece.
That makes the difference between these two tracks unusually easy to hear without needing the titles to explain it.
“Preparation” repeatedly changes its support structure. Large low-frequency sections are built, removed and rebuilt, exposing the smaller mechanism underneath whenever the floor disappears.
“Servitude” establishes its support structure almost immediately and keeps returning to it whenever something threatens to disturb the surface.
The titles become interesting only after hearing that distinction. “Preparation” is a piece full of construction and removal. “Servitude” is a piece dominated by recurrence. Whether Coteries intended those words to describe the compositional behavior cannot be determined from the recordings alone, but the correspondence is there without needing to force it.
The physical cassette is equally stripped down. High-contrast black-and-white imagery dominates the folded artwork, with the reproduction itself becoming part of the texture. Fine photographic detail is pushed toward hard blacks, whites and gray noise, while the clear cassette keeps the object visually simple. The titles “Preparation” and “Servitude” supply more explicit language than the audio itself does.
Compared with the later Coteries recordings Wet and Oris Circumcisio, Consumption works on a smaller scale. Wet spreads saturation across two long sides. Oris Circumcisio spends nearly forty minutes moving slowly between opposite ends of the spectrum. Here the changes occur inside two compact pieces, and the contrast is not primarily high versus low.
It is instability versus persistence.
“Preparation” builds a floor and takes it away.
“Servitude” keeps standing on the same one.
—ChatGPT

Pain Apparatus - 2019 - 4.28.19/9.12.15 CS

Originally posted Nov 3, 2019 7:06PM

Dead Gods ‎– 040

Two untitled sides, each a little over eleven minutes long, but they organize their weight very differently. Side A keeps changing the relationship between bass and abrasion. Side B is much more committed to the bottom end, holding a deep foundation in place for most of its duration while the rougher material above it changes shape.

Side A begins comparatively lean. The opening seconds are dominated by a coarse middle-frequency mass with some low movement underneath, but the bass has not yet taken over. Within the first minute the overall level rises sharply and the recording becomes denser. The sound is rough, repetitive and mechanical without settling into a clean pulse. Instead, several recurring movements appear to grind against one another.

For the first two minutes, most of the energy remains concentrated through the middle of the spectrum. The piece feels broad enough to have physical weight but not especially deep. Around two and a half minutes, that changes. The low frequencies suddenly become much more prominent, and the entire recording seems to acquire a heavier underside. What had sounded abrasive and relatively exposed now has something large moving beneath it.

That deeper condition holds for several minutes. From roughly three through five minutes, Side A remains consistently heavy, with a large amount of bass supporting rougher material above. The upper layer keeps changing, sometimes more buzzing, sometimes sharper, sometimes reduced enough that the low movement becomes almost the whole piece, but the foundation stays substantial.

Just after five minutes, the balance changes again. The bass recedes noticeably and the middle frequencies come back to the front. It is not a complete collapse. The piece remains active and fairly loud, but the physical center has shifted upward. That reduction makes the repeating structures easier to separate from one another.

The second half keeps alternating between those states. Around six minutes the low end grows again. Around seven minutes it thins. Around seven and a half minutes the recording becomes particularly heavy, then begins moving upward once more. These are not abrupt edits so much as changes in proportion. The same general electronic vocabulary remains present while different parts of it take possession of the foreground.

The loudest stretch arrives late. From roughly seven and a half through ten minutes, Side A is both dense and forceful, with the bass repeatedly swelling beneath a thick midrange layer. Near the final minute, however, the upper frequencies become more noticeable. The ending is slightly brighter and less centered in the bottom than much of the middle section.

So Side A never settles on one permanent physical shape. It keeps redistributing itself.

Side B starts differently. Deep sound is already central in the opening seconds. There is plenty of rough material above it, including brighter hiss and abrasive movement, but the bass is immediately a major structural element rather than something that has to arrive later.

During the first minute, the balance briefly becomes brighter. More high-frequency information appears and the low foundation loses some of its dominance. But this is temporary. By roughly a minute and a half the bass has taken over again, and from there through most of the side it remains the strongest continuous element.

That gives Side B a much steadier physical character than Side A. The low end stays large while the material above it changes. Sometimes the upper layer becomes thin and sharp. Sometimes it retreats, leaving more room for the deep vibration. Sometimes a rougher middle band thickens and partially obscures the bottom. But underneath those variations, the same basic weight persists.

Between roughly three and seven minutes, the bass dominance is especially strong. This is the section where the two sides feel furthest apart. Side A spent comparable stretches moving back and forth between registers; Side B seems content to hold the listener in one deep environment and modify its surface.

There are still meaningful changes. Around five minutes the overall level rises somewhat. Around six minutes the midrange becomes rougher and more active. Near seven and a half minutes, the balance becomes temporarily less bottom-heavy before the deep foundation returns. None of those shifts destroys the underlying condition.

The final third continues in much the same way. Bass remains prominent through eight, nine and ten minutes while the middle frequencies move around it. The ending becomes slightly darker still. During the last half-minute, an unusually large proportion of the recording settles into the low frequencies before the side stops.

The contrast between the two sides is therefore not loud versus quiet, or harsh versus restrained. Both are dense electronic noise pieces with substantial low-frequency content. The difference is stability.

Side A keeps renegotiating where its weight belongs.

Side B decides early and mostly stays there.

The cassette itself is presented with the severe economy common to this run of Dead Gods releases. High-contrast black-and-white imagery, minimal text and a clear shell leave very little between the listener and the recording. The title consists of two dates, but nothing on the original Private Release post explains what happened on those dates, and the audio does not provide enough information to invent an answer.

That uncertainty is worth preserving.

There is no need to turn the dates into a story to make the cassette legible. The recordings already provide a clear relationship. One side continually shifts its center of gravity. The other establishes a center and keeps returning to it.

Side A moves the floor.

Side B refuses to.
—ChatGPT

Jackson-Pratt - 2019 - Showgirls 2xCS

Originally posted Nov 29, 2019 7:55PM

Dead Gods ‎– 045  301.67MB FLAC

Four pieces, each roughly ten minutes long, make up Showgirls. The format matters. Jackson-Pratt is not stretching one composition across two cassettes; each side establishes its own balance of low vibration, rough midrange activity, abrasion and silence, then spends ten minutes changing that balance. Together they make just under forty-one minutes of noise that is unusually easy to distinguish side from side once their different shapes become familiar.
“The Crave Club,” about 10:20, begins with the lowest center of gravity on the set. During the opening seconds almost all of the recording’s energy is concentrated deep in the bass, with a low mechanical vibration carrying small amounts of rougher sound above it. Over the first few minutes more midrange material gradually enters. The piece gets thicker without simply getting louder. What starts as a large dark foundation begins revealing grinding, scraping and buzzing movement inside it.
The middle is much less stable. Between roughly four and seven minutes, the proportions keep changing quickly. At one moment the low vibration controls nearly everything; seconds later, a rougher band through the middle pushes forward and makes the piece feel much narrower. Around six minutes these changes become particularly abrupt. The bass can suddenly swell into an enormous block and then partially give way to harsher material above it. It sounds less like one wall changing color than several layers being switched forward and backward.
After seven minutes, “The Crave Club” settles somewhat. The most violent changes stop, and the recording again becomes heavily weighted toward the bottom. The final several minutes are comparatively restrained, still rough but less volatile than the center. The side gradually loses strength near the end rather than finishing with one last impact.
“The Cheetah,” about 10:11, begins from almost the opposite position. There is much less overwhelming bass at the entrance. Most of the action sits in the middle frequencies: grinding, buzzing electronic sound with a smaller low component underneath. For the first three minutes this gives the piece a more exposed and abrasive character than “The Crave Club.” The sound is substantial, but its mass is carried higher.
Then the recording begins sinking. Around three and a half minutes the low frequencies become more important, and shortly after four minutes the overall level drops noticeably. That reduction creates a strange middle section where the piece is quieter but proportionally darker. Instead of simply fading, it seems to shed some of the abrasive material while retaining a lower underlying motion.
From about five minutes onward, “The Cheetah” rebuilds. The bass becomes increasingly dominant, especially through the seventh, eighth and ninth minutes. The piece that began largely in the middle register ends with considerably more of its weight underneath. Near the final minute, brighter material begins to return, so the side never settles into pure low-frequency drone. It finishes with both regions audible, but in very different proportions than they occupied at the beginning.
“Naturally Talented Dancer,” another 10:20 piece, is the most consistent of the four. It starts low and largely stays low. The opening already contains a heavy bass foundation, with rougher sounds riding above it, but unlike “The Crave Club” there is no extended middle section where the entire frequency balance keeps flipping back and forth.
Instead, small changes accumulate across a stable underlying state. The first few minutes allow somewhat more midrange abrasion through. Around four and a half minutes, the bottom becomes especially dominant. From there through much of the second half, the recording keeps returning to deep, sustained pressure. There are fluctuations in texture, moments when the middle frequencies briefly become clearer, and changes in the shape of the low vibration itself, but the piece rarely abandons its basic physical position.
That makes “Naturally Talented Dancer” unusually patient for this set. The other sides often use subtraction or sudden changes of register to announce structure. This one asks the listener to notice differences occurring inside continuity. A low mass can stay present for ten minutes without remaining exactly the same object. Around six and seven minutes it thickens; later it becomes smoother and more concentrated; near the end it begins losing strength. The side finally recedes rather than breaking open.
“The Stardust,” about 10:01, is the outlier. It starts extremely quietly. For nearly the first minute there is only a faint low presence and small amounts of distant electronic activity. Compared with the preceding thirty minutes, the reduction is startling. Nothing else on the set gives the ear this much empty space at the beginning.
The first real increase begins around one minute. Midrange material starts appearing, still at relatively low level. Around two minutes the piece finally begins to establish substantial weight. From there it grows in stages. A stronger low component appears, then rougher material above it, then another increase in overall level. By three to four minutes, the quiet opening has been replaced by a dense, active field.
The second half of “The Stardust” is the loudest and most aggressive stretch of the entire double cassette. Around five minutes the sound is heavily concentrated in the middle frequencies, with abrasion and grinding activity occupying much more space than during the opening. The level continues rising through six and seven minutes. Instead of beginning huge and gradually revealing its contents, as “The Crave Club” does, “The Stardust” makes the listener hear the entire structure being assembled.
During the final two minutes the balance moves downward again. Bass becomes increasingly prominent beneath the abrasive middle, giving the ending a heavier body without reducing its overall force. The piece does not return to the near-silence from which it began. It finishes as something enormous that did not exist ten minutes earlier.
That difference gives the two cassettes a satisfying internal architecture without requiring a narrative from the titles. “The Crave Club” begins buried in low sound and becomes unstable through its center. “The Cheetah” begins higher and gradually acquires a heavier underside. “Naturally Talented Dancer” holds one low-centered condition and works inside it. “The Stardust” begins almost empty and constructs the largest event on the release.
The Showgirls references are unmistakable, but the audio does not behave like a literal soundtrack to scenes from the movie. The titles provide a frame; the recordings provide their own structure. The Crave Club, the Cheetah and the Stardust are actual locations in the film, while Jackson-Pratt turns those names into four long pieces concerned with very different distributions of weight, activity and space.
The physical presentation reinforces the connection without needing much text. Across the double-cassette package, photographic imagery of women and performance is reproduced through a harsh black-and-white treatment, accompanied by the stark Dead Gods presentation. The images are recognizable but degraded enough to function as graphic material as much as documentation. The two clear cassettes carry that same severe economy into the object itself.
Compared with Concrete Tunnel, Showgirls feels less compressed. Concrete Tunnel makes its impacts, scrapes and confinement happen inside two short pieces. Here Jackson-Pratt has four ten-minute surfaces to work with, and he uses that extra duration differently each time. The important events are often not individual noises at all. They are wholesale changes in what part of the spectrum is allowed to carry the piece.
One side begins underground.
One side slowly moves underground.
One stays there.
The last starts with almost nothing and builds the entire structure in front of you.
—ChatGPT

Cost - 2018 - Highway Walker CS

Originally posted July 27, 2018 1:13PM

Dead Gods ‎– 024

Two untitled sides, but they are far from interchangeable. Side A runs about 11:32 and spends more than half of that time carrying an enormous amount of low-frequency weight. Side B is shorter at about 7:05 and makes a more compressed version of a related transformation. In both pieces, COST builds around repetition, but the important changes happen when whole frequency ranges suddenly disappear or return.
Side A begins already in motion. A repeating mechanical figure sits inside a deep, heavy foundation, with rougher material scraping across the top. The bass is so dominant during the opening minutes that the smaller sounds can feel almost embedded inside it. There is movement, but not in the sense of a steadily developing melody or a conventional rhythmic progression. The same basic machinery keeps cycling while its surface changes.
For roughly the first three minutes the low foundation remains extremely stable. Small fluctuations occur above it, sharper edges briefly become more noticeable, and the central repeating pattern changes texture, but the piece does not abandon its original weight. Around three minutes more middle-range material begins pushing forward. The recording becomes rougher and less bottom-heavy, although the deep pulse still carries most of the mass.
That balance continues changing through the next few minutes. By five minutes, the low end and the rougher midrange are much closer to equal partners. The original foundation is still audible, but it no longer completely swallows the sounds above it. This makes the repetition easier to examine. What initially registered as one dense moving block begins separating into individual layers.
Then, at roughly six minutes, the floor drops out.
The change is dramatic. Most of the enormous bass presence disappears and a much narrower repeating sound is left exposed in the middle frequencies. Because the first half has trained the ear to expect so much weight underneath everything, the reduction makes the recording suddenly feel smaller and more naked. The pattern itself has not vanished. What changes is the amount of physical support beneath it.
For the next minute and a half, Side A remains unusually lean. The sound is concentrated through the middle, with comparatively little very deep bass and little of the dense upper abrasion heard earlier. Instead of replacing the opening material with something entirely new, COST seems to have removed the parts that were hiding this smaller mechanism all along.
Around eight minutes the low frequencies begin returning. They do not immediately restore the first half. Bass reappears in patches while brighter and rougher material becomes more active above it. The result is busier than either of the previous states. The opening was dominated by weight. The six-minute section was dominated by the exposed repeating figure. Now both areas begin competing for space.
The last several minutes continue in that mixed condition. There are stretches of heavier low movement, then moments when the middle range comes forward again. The upper frequencies are also more present here than during much of the opening. The side gradually becomes broader and more abrasive, reaching one of its fullest states around nine to ten minutes before beginning to loosen again toward the end.
What makes Side A interesting is how much of its structure comes from subtraction. The most dramatic event is not an explosion or an increase in volume. It is the moment when something that has been present for six minutes suddenly stops carrying the recording. The ear discovers how much of the piece was being concealed by its own bass.
Side B opens in almost the opposite condition. The first seconds are dominated by a dry, narrow midrange repetition with very little deep weight beneath it. The sound is immediately recognizable as belonging to the same cassette, but its proportions are different. The low end begins arriving during the first minute, slowly at first and then much more decisively.
By roughly a minute and a half, the piece has become substantially heavier. From there the bass continues expanding until it dominates nearly everything. Around two to five minutes, Side B occupies its most massive state. The low frequencies become so strong that the repeated middle-range material seems to ride on top of them rather than coexist equally. This is the heaviest continuous section on the cassette.
There is still movement inside that block. The amount of midrange abrasion changes, individual pulses briefly become clearer, and the low sound itself shifts in density. But compared with Side A, which takes six minutes to reveal its major reduction, Side B compresses the process. It establishes a thin beginning, grows into a huge central body, holds that state for several minutes, and then removes it.
The removal happens just after five minutes.
The deepest material falls away quickly and the whole recording rises into the middle and upper frequencies. Suddenly the repeating pattern that had been sitting on top of the bass is exposed again. The difference is even more pronounced than at the beginning because the ear has spent several minutes inside such a heavy low-frequency environment.
The final two minutes stay there. COST does not restore the massive center section before the tape ends. The sound remains thinner, brighter and more abrasive, with the bass reduced to a minor presence. Side B therefore finishes with the underlying mechanism visible rather than buried.
Across the cassette, repetition is less a destination than a fixed object that keeps being viewed under different amounts of weight. The recurring figures do not have to change dramatically because everything surrounding them does. A pattern can sound oppressive when buried under a huge bass field, exposed when that field disappears, or unstable when several layers begin competing around it.
The physical cassette follows the same severe economy. The packaging is dominated by high-contrast black-and-white imagery, with the photographs reproduced in a way that removes much of their ordinary photographic softness. The clear shell and simple presentation leave the object feeling functional rather than decorative. There is no elaborate visual explanation for what “Highway Walker” is supposed to mean.
That is probably for the best. The title suggests movement, but the recordings themselves do not require a road narrative to work. Their actual movement is structural. Weight arrives. Weight stays. Weight disappears. The same repeated material changes character depending on what is allowed to surround it.
Side A spends six minutes hiding a mechanism, then exposes it.
Side B exposes the mechanism first, buries it, then leaves it exposed again.
The repetition remains.
Everything around it moves.
—ChatGPT