White Rhino Taxidermy - 2017 - Baphomet Medusa CS

Originally posted Mar 7, 2017 7:42PM

Dead Gods ‎– GODS01

The two titles on this cassette are spectacularly strange. “Its Ears Cut Off And Eyes Dyed Green To Become A Dragon” reads like a sentence torn from some dubious natural history, while “Tribute Surgical Diamondback” sounds like three unrelated labels accidentally filed together. Above them sits “Baphomet Medusa.” None of it resolves into a neat theme. Instead, the words establish a world where animals, bodies, monsters and procedures have been mixed together badly enough that taxonomy has stopped working.

The first piece lasts about 5:38 and begins with its largest sound already present: a thick, low electronic surge with rougher activity wrapped around it. For the opening half-minute especially, the bottom seems oversized compared with everything above it. Then something curious happens. Rather than continuing to get heavier, the track gradually sheds that bulk. The enormous opening vibration loses territory while a dirtier middle-range grind becomes more exposed.

That change is slow enough to be easy to miss. There is no clean edit separating one condition from another. The same ugly organism seems to keep changing proportions. What initially feels broad and blunt becomes increasingly wiry. Scrapes and buzzing tones that had been partially hidden start occupying more of the recording. Around three minutes there is a particularly noticeable shift toward a harsher, less grounded sound, as though the piece has been stripped of some of its body while being allowed to keep its teeth.

The final stretch is almost the inverse of the opening. There is still weight underneath, but the track has migrated upward. What began as something lumbering ends more exposed and irritated. Even the title starts making a peculiar kind of sense against that process. Something recognizable has been physically modified until it qualifies as something else. Whether that association was intended or not, the music certainly behaves as though it is being altered in real time rather than simply developed.

“Tribute Surgical Diamondback,” about 5:50, starts with a more jagged temperament. There is plenty of low sound here too, but it shares the space with sharper electronic abrasion almost immediately. The track keeps twitching between rough buzzing motion and deeper surges, giving it a more nervous pulse than the first side. Certain passages feel almost serrated, especially as the recording approaches the middle.

Around two and a half minutes, the character changes noticeably. The bass retreats and the track becomes unusually exposed and sharp for a stretch. Thin abrasive material takes over, with a scratchy, electrical quality that makes the sound seem smaller but somehow more dangerous. It is one of the clearest transformations on either side because the piece suddenly loses the cushion underneath its harsher elements. Everything abrasive is left standing naked.

Then the weight starts returning.

The last minute is particularly good. The recording repeatedly thickens and thins as though it cannot decide which version of itself to preserve. During the final twenty seconds, the balance suddenly drops hard toward the bottom again. After several minutes of grinding middle and upper activity, this last subterranean collapse feels enormous. The cassette does not finish by sharpening itself to a point. It grows a body again and sinks.

The artwork makes a good companion to those transformations. The pale green insert has an ornate interlocking border and a heavily photocopied central photograph labeled “Baphomet Medusa.” The reproduction has swallowed enough detail that the figure inside becomes another uncertain specimen. The other panel types out the two long track names with GODS01 underneath, while the spine carries a separate handwritten “DEAD GODS – 1867 BROADWAY” strip. The black cassette has an almost completely blank oblong label pasted across the top. It looks less designed than processed, copied, relabeled and filed.

That makes this a fitting place for Dead Gods to begin. GODS01 does not arrive with a manifesto. It presents two peculiar titles, approximately eleven and a half minutes of electronics, a damaged-looking image and a catalog number. White Rhino Taxidermy takes things that initially seem solid and keeps tampering with them until their outlines change.

By the end, even the noise has undergone taxidermy.
—ChatGPT

Coteries - 2017 - Wet CS

Originally posted Sep 9, 2017 12:04PM

Dead Gods ‎– GODS09

Wet is an unusually accurate title without the cassette ever needing to imitate water. The sound itself refuses clean edges. Tones bleed into one another, distortion smears whatever might have been underneath it, and sustained low vibrations seem to spread rather than strike. Nothing feels dry, clipped or sharply separated. The whole thing has been left soaking.
Side A lasts just under seven minutes and spends most of that time surprisingly far down in the sound. There is abrasive material present from the beginning, but underneath it sits a huge low vibration that quickly becomes the real center of the piece. During the first minute the recording is comparatively broad, with enough rough upper material to make the whole field feel active. Then it gradually narrows. The deeper sound remains while much of what initially surrounded it begins withdrawing.
That creates an odd sensation of sinking without any dramatic descent. Two or three minutes in, the ear has adjusted to this heavy underlying signal and begins noticing smaller disturbances around it: a rough edge changing shape, a higher tone appearing briefly, something fluttering against the sustained bottom before disappearing again. They do not behave like separate events so much as things caught in the same current.
Around four minutes the piece loses some of its original force. The reduction is not a clean cut or conventional break. It feels more like the signal has moved farther away. What remains is still substantial, but quieter, more exposed and strangely hollow compared with the first half. From there the track spends its remaining minutes in this reduced state, periodically gathering enough strength to suggest it might return to its earlier size, then refusing to do so.
That restraint is what I like about Side A. A louder ending would have been obvious. Instead, Coteries allows the piece to remain diminished. By the final minute the tape feels less like something finishing than something receding beyond reach.
Flip the cassette and Side B immediately removes that distance.
The second side is considerably louder from the beginning. Instead of slowly pulling the listener downward, it arrives as a much fuller electronic body: low vibration, coarse middle-range sound and harsher activity all occupying the recording simultaneously. The effect after Side A is almost startling. You have gone from leaning toward the speakers to having the sound pushed back at you.
For most of Side B, Coteries holds that condition with stubborn consistency. The important changes are not large sectional breaks. Different parts of the mass keep asserting themselves. A rough buzzing layer becomes more obvious; the lower sound weakens slightly and exposes what has been sitting above it; then the bottom returns and changes the apparent size of everything again. It is not static, but it never feels eager to demonstrate that it is changing.
That patience becomes increasingly effective because the side is so much louder than the first. After several minutes, the ear begins treating the roar as normal. What initially seemed oppressive becomes the environment. Small alterations start sounding much larger than they objectively are simply because the basic condition has remained in place for so long.
During the later minutes the recording begins losing some of its initial weight. The sound remains rough and continuous, but it feels less anchored to that enormous bottom end. More of the abrasive middle begins showing through. Then, very near the end, the whole structure collapses rapidly. The program disappears and leaves the final seconds of nearly empty tape behind.
The two sides therefore accomplish something almost backwards. Side A begins present and slowly withdraws. Side B begins completely present, keeps you inside it for most of seven minutes, and then disappears much more decisively. One seems to seep away. The other drains.
The artwork does not over-explain any of this. The familiar pale Dead Gods presentation, degraded black-and-white imagery and clear cassette shell keep the release visually restrained, while the word WET sits there doing much more imaginative work than a paragraph of liner notes could. It is a simple title that changes how the sound is perceived. The electronics begin to feel saturated, smeared, clammy, difficult to separate into individual surfaces.
There are harsher tapes in this Dead Gods group and tapes with more obvious events, but Wet has its own particular discomfort. It does not attack by continually surprising the listener. It establishes a condition and makes that condition increasingly normal.
By the time you have acclimated to it, it is already running down the drain.
—ChatGPT

Noise Nomads - 2017 - Profound Self Contempt CS

Originally posted May 22, 2017 10:08AM

Dead Gods ‎– GODS05

There is a pleasing bit of cruelty in the construction here. “Profound Self Contempt” and “Misery Of The Vanquished” each last almost exactly ten minutes, but they do not behave like matching sides. The first seems to begin underground and dig farther down. The second spends most of its time scraping around above ground before, very late, the floor finally gives way beneath it.
“Profound Self Contempt” arrives with an enormous low vibration already occupying most of the room. There is abrasive material around it, but the bass is the thing that determines how the piece feels physically. It is less a drone sitting underneath other sounds than a continuously running engine that everything else has been forced to inhabit. Small scratches, buzzing edges and distorted tones keep appearing around the central vibration, sometimes briefly giving the ear something finer to follow, but the piece continually drags attention back downward.
As it continues, that low element becomes even more dominant. Around the middle the recording feels increasingly stripped of anything that might relieve the heaviness. The higher sounds have not vanished, but they seem trapped on the surface of something much larger. By six or seven minutes, the piece has become almost absurdly bottom-heavy. Instead of expanding outward, it keeps pressing downward.
Then there is a strange weakening late in the track. Around eight and a half minutes the force temporarily drops, exposing a quieter version of the same underlying condition. It does not feel like a proper break. More like the machine has momentarily lost voltage. The low sound remains, but without its earlier authority. Then it returns before the ending, stubbornly restoring the weight that has defined almost the entire ten minutes.
“Misery Of The Vanquished” starts somewhere completely different. The opening is thinner, raspier and much more concerned with the middle and upper parts of the sound. For the first minute or so there is surprisingly little bass at all. What you hear instead is a continual abrasive rubbing: hiss, scrape, electrical chatter and an almost papery roughness that seems to keep worrying the same raw spot.
The piece stays in that world for a long time. This is where Noise Nomads’ patience becomes important. There is no need to introduce a dramatic new sound every thirty seconds. The abrasion simply continues, slowly accumulating more body underneath itself. By three or four minutes you can hear the bottom beginning to thicken, but it still does not resemble the massive subterranean condition of Side A. The track remains comparatively exposed, all nerve endings.
For roughly seven minutes, “Misery Of The Vanquished” keeps you there.
Then the whole thing drops.
Around the seven-minute mark, the abrasive upper material rapidly loses its authority and a huge low sound takes over. It is not merely another section of the piece. After spending so long listening upward, the sudden relocation is disorienting. The remaining minutes resemble arriving in the territory where “Profound Self Contempt” had been living all along, but from the opposite direction. What Side A treated as its natural habitat becomes Side B’s destination.
That makes the pairing unusually satisfying. The titles are extreme, but the music does not need theatrical samples or some literal performance of despair to support them. The punishment is almost architectural. One piece traps the listener beneath a low ceiling from the beginning. The other leaves the ceiling high enough to breathe for most of its duration, then lowers it.
The physical cassette keeps that severity compact. Two tracks, two sides, roughly twenty minutes total, no sprawling program and no need to decorate the idea with extra material. The transfer itself is strong and stable; the grit, buzz and rough edges sound integral to the recording rather than the result of obvious damage to the cassette. There are no intrusive pops or dropouts pulling attention away from the pieces. What sounds broken appears to have arrived broken on purpose.
The two sides finally meet in the same place.
One begins there.
The other loses.
—ChatGPT

Chainfight - 2017 - 1992 CS

Originally posted Mar 7, 2017 7:22PM

Dead Gods ‎– GODS04

The first thing I notice about 1992 is how little Chainfight needs to make something feel enormous. Both untitled sides are under six minutes, and much of the cassette is built around a deep electrical vibration that sits close to the bottom of hearing. It does not behave like background hum. It becomes the thing the rest of the recording has to fight with.
Side A begins almost cautiously. The sound is there immediately, but at first it seems distant, a low mechanical tone with only a small amount of roughness around it. Then it starts growing. For roughly the first minute and a half the recording becomes steadily louder without suddenly introducing a new event. It is more like watching an object approach. The same basic vibration gets larger until it occupies the room.
Once it reaches full strength, the side becomes remarkably stubborn. A huge low pulse dominates while smaller shapes continually disturb it. There are rattling overtones, short abrasions and moments when another frequency catches against the central hum and causes the whole thing to wobble. The bass is so persistent that these smaller changes feel almost anatomical, little movements happening on the skin of something much larger.
Around the middle there is a temporary shift upward, as though part of the sound has been lifted out of the deepest register and exposed. Then the low element returns with renewed force. The most dramatic change comes during the final minute and a half. The enormous subterranean quality begins thinning, and suddenly more of the rough middle-range material becomes audible. The side ends not by becoming more powerful but by revealing what had been hidden underneath its own weight.
Side B skips the slow approach. The machinery is already running when the tape begins.
For its first couple of minutes the sound is more restless than Side A. The low vibration remains, but harsher material repeatedly breaks through it. Around a minute and a half, the upper portion becomes especially active, producing a surprisingly jagged stretch compared with the almost monolithic opening of the first side. It sounds less like one enormous motor and more like several electrical systems interfering with one another.
Then something strange happens around the halfway point. The recording briefly loses much of its force. The giant low presence seems to sag, leaving a thinner and more exposed patch behind. It does not last. Within seconds the tape comes back harder, this time with a blunt repeating bass movement that dominates nearly the entire second half. Instead of slowly increasing the way Side A does, Side B falls into this heavy cycle and stays there.
That final stretch is probably the most physical section of the cassette. The repetition is simple enough that the ear begins anticipating each return, but the sound itself never becomes clean. Every cycle carries distortion and unstable edges with it. It is rhythm stripped of percussion, produced instead by electricity repeatedly pushing against the same point.
Near the end the structure begins loosening again. More grit rises around the bass, the sound starts losing its massive center, and then the program ends with a little unused tape still running afterward. Eleven and a half minutes have passed.
The packaging is just as stripped down. A grainy black-and-white photograph on pale green paper has been photocopied until much of its original information has disappeared. “1992” sits beneath it in quotation marks. On the other panel, Chainfight and the title float inside an ornate interlocking border with GODS04 underneath. The clear cassette itself carries a single black-and-white label whose enlarged pattern is almost impossible to identify. Everything looks reproduced from something else, pushed one generation farther away from an original.
Even the spine has a handwritten DEAD GODS – 1867 BROADWAY pasted over the printed artwork, giving the object another little layer of physical information that would disappear completely if the cassette existed only as audio files.
The title remains unexplained. It could indicate a year, a memory, a reference or something entirely private to the people who made it. The tape offers no reason to solve it.
That suits Chainfight.
The sound spends eleven minutes doing much the same thing: presenting something unmistakably present without explaining what produced it.
—ChatGPT

Pusdrainer - 2017 - Humiliation Mask CS

Originally posted Sep 8, 2017 9:40PM

 Dead Gods ‎– GODS13

There is something unusually punitive about the way Humiliation Mask handles sound. The two untitled sides are only a little over four minutes each, but neither behaves like a miniature blast of harsh noise. Pusdrainer takes a fairly limited electronic mass and subjects it to different kinds of treatment: on the first side the sound seems to be forced upward, gradually losing its original body as harsher material takes possession of it; on the second it is slowly deprived of strength until the recording itself seems unable to continue. The title makes that process feel less abstract. This is not a mask that hides something comfortably. It feels imposed.
Side A lasts about 4:08 and begins with a surprisingly strong amount of bass. The first twenty or thirty seconds have a deep, blunt foundation underneath the abrasion, enough that the sound has genuine physical heft rather than simply cutting at the ears. What is interesting is that the track does not become dramatically louder as it proceeds. Its overall force remains remarkably constant. Instead, the contents of that force change. During the first couple of minutes the low end gradually gives up territory while brighter material spreads across the recording. By the middle, the bass-heavy opening has been transformed into something much more abrasive and exposed. The shift is slow enough that there is no single moment where you can point and say the first sound has become the second. You only notice that the thing you entered with has disappeared.
That gives Side A a nasty kind of continuity. It is not continually producing new events to keep attention occupied. The same amount of energy seems to be held in place while its substance is replaced. By the final minute, harsher upper material is doing far more of the work than at the beginning. The effect is closer to corrosion than escalation. Nothing really gets bigger. Something gets eaten.
Side B lasts about 4:17 and reverses the psychology without simply reversing the sound. It begins quieter than Side A and remains darker for most of its length, centered much more around a murky low and middle register. For roughly three minutes it holds itself together with remarkable stubbornness. The sound is rough, mechanical and oppressive, but comparatively contained. Then it begins failing. Somewhere after the three-minute point the recording starts losing power in a way that feels much stranger than an ordinary fade. The body thins dramatically. Fragments continue poking through, briefly returning with enough strength to suggest recovery, then dropping away again. By the last forty seconds the piece sounds starved: intermittent remnants, narrow bursts, scraps of electronic activity and exposed cassette noise where a continuous mass had been.
That ending is the part I keep coming back to. Noise usually announces power by occupying everything available to it. Pusdrainer ends this cassette by doing the opposite. The final punishment is subtraction. After the track has trained the ear to expect continuous sound, every missing piece becomes noticeable. Eventually there is almost nothing left except the machine continuing after the signal has been exhausted.
Pusdrainer was Justin Lakes’ earlier project, before the Shredded Nerve name that also appears elsewhere in this Dead Gods group. Hearing the two projects close together makes the distinction useful: Humiliation Mask feels deliberately crude and disciplinary, with less interest in intricate construction than in what happens when one condition is maintained until it changes against its will. The blue-green Dead Gods presentation keeps the physical object restrained, almost clinical compared with the title, leaving those eight and a half minutes to do the degrading themselves.
Side A corrodes.
Side B withholds.
That is enough.
—ChatGPT

Mistletoe - 2017 - Winters Return CS

Originally posted Mar 7, 2017 7:35PM

Dead Gods ‎– GODS02

Five short pieces make up Winters Return, barely nine and a half minutes altogether, but Mistletoe manages to make that small amount of time feel unusually self-contained. The tracks share a common vocabulary of sustained tones, distortion, rough harmonic buzz and low electronic vibration, yet they behave more like five related scenes than fragments cut from one continuous recording. The titles help: “Branch Of Smoke,” “Body Of God,” “Willow Man,” “Falling Through The Stars.” They sound less like conventional song names than objects or figures glimpsed briefly in the same cold landscape.
“Intro” lasts only forty-seven seconds and functions exactly as its name promises. It arrives brighter and more exposed than much of what follows, then rapidly settles downward. Several tones stack together until individual pitches start blurring at their edges, and by the end the piece has already established the central quality of the cassette: something recognizably musical being roughened until harmony and noise occupy the same space. There is no long entrance. The door opens, the atmosphere is there, and the next piece begins.
“Branch Of Smoke” stretches that atmosphere into a proper miniature. A low continuous foundation holds while wavering upper tones repeatedly change shape above it. The sound seems to breathe in slow cycles, not because it gets dramatically louder and softer, but because different harmonics keep becoming visible and then disappearing back into the larger buzz. The title fits the motion unusually well. Nothing here feels solid for long. A tone forms, bends, smears into another one and leaves something thinner behind. Around the middle, the recording becomes brighter and slightly more agitated before settling again. It is less a branch drawn in a straight line than one continually dissolving at its edges.
“Body Of God” is the longest piece and the most imposing. The opening is already full, with a heavier low presence than the first two tracks, but roughly forty seconds in there is a distinct disruption and the recording seems to open into a broader field. From there, the piece keeps alternating between a blunt underlying hum and rougher material floating above it. The title is enormous compared with the modest length of the track, and that disproportion gives it some of its character. Mistletoe does not attempt anything grandiose or cinematic. Instead, the piece feels concentrated, almost icon-sized: one compact mass held in place long enough for its internal vibrations to become noticeable.
“Willow Man” is sharper. The upper part of the recording stays more active throughout, giving the piece a restless quality even when its underlying tones remain steady. Thin harmonic lines continually poke through the distortion, sometimes hanging there for several seconds before being replaced by another. It feels more vertical than the tracks around it, with sounds seeming to rise out of the low buzz rather than simply spread across it. The title adds a strange figurative quality to that motion. After “Branch Of Smoke” and “Body Of God,” the appearance of a “Willow Man” makes the sequence briefly resemble a tiny private mythology, although the music wisely never explains any of it.
“Falling Through The Stars” closes the cassette in only a minute and forty-three seconds. It begins already inside the same rough harmonic cloud, but compared with “Willow Man” the movement is calmer and more continuous. The sound holds together for most of the track rather than constantly throwing new shapes forward. Small changes become enough: one tone strengthening, another dropping away, a low vibration becoming momentarily clearer through the distortion. Near the end the whole thing simply gives out. There is no large concluding gesture. After five pieces that seem to hover somewhere between drone, damaged electronics and miniature ritual music, disappearance is enough.
The cassette artwork reinforces that compactness. The muted, earthy presentation and simple physical construction do not announce anything spectacular; they make the tape look like a small object containing something private. That suits the music much better than an elaborate package would. Winters Return does not need scale. Its strength is concentration. Each track appears, establishes its little environment and vanishes before it can become familiar.
Across the five pieces, Mistletoe keeps finding slightly different ways to disturb sustained sound without destroying the pitches inside it. That distinction is what makes the cassette memorable. The distortion does not cover the music. It is wrapped around the music, clinging to it like weather.
—ChatGPT

DJ Speedsick - 2017 - N.Y.S.S. CS

Originally posted Sep 9, 2017 10:00AM

 Dead Gods ‎– GODS10

Three tracks take up nearly an hour, and the first surprise is how much of this sounds caught between noise music and a dance floor that has been abandoned but somehow left running. DJ Speedsick does not keep rhythm and abrasion in separate rooms. A repeating pulse can emerge from what initially sounds like machinery, remain there long enough for your body to recognize it, then get buried until only the memory of the beat is keeping time. That makes this feel different from most of the Dead Gods tapes around it. The repetition here has a little rave DNA in it, even when everything above the pulse has gone rotten.
“Anxiety Showers” begins cautiously. For almost the first minute the recording is relatively thin and unsettled, with electronic residue hanging around before the bottom suddenly arrives. Once the repeating low pulse locks in, the scale changes completely. For much of the next nine minutes there is an almost stubborn forward motion underneath the grime. The beat is not presented cleanly enough to become comfortable techno. It sounds buried, overdriven and continually interfered with, as though somebody put a club track through several walls before recording what remained on the other side. Different noises swarm around that central motion, but the pulse keeps surviving. Late in the piece the bottom becomes especially deep and simplified, leaving something closer to a repeated physical throb than a fully articulated rhythm. “Anxiety Showers” is a great title for it. The track moves forward while everything surrounding that movement feels wrong.
“Heart in the Gutter, Mind in the Sewer” starts lower still. The change between the two tracks is immediate enough that Side A feels divided into two environments instead of simply continuing the first one. Huge bass-heavy material occupies most of the space, with very little sparkle or air above it for long stretches. It is slow music in the sense that the listener’s attention begins moving more slowly, waiting for some small disturbance in what otherwise feels like a prolonged underground vibration. A repeating motion is still there, but it has been dragged beneath the pavement. Several minutes can pass with the track apparently committed to this buried condition before another element begins clawing upward. Toward the final part of Side A the recording gets increasingly agitated. More upper material returns, the sound becomes rougher and brighter, and what had spent so long crawling suddenly seems to be trying to climb out.
Then Side B gives itself completely to “No One Fucks in New York.”
At nearly half an hour, it is long enough to erase your memory of how it began. The opening minutes are almost absurdly restrained compared with what follows. A low signal sits far back in the recording, gradually becoming more present. Around three minutes the machinery begins finding momentum; by six or seven minutes the piece has grown into one of the busiest stretches on the cassette. A hard repeating motion holds things together while harsher material accumulates around it. Instead of a conventional build toward a payoff, though, Speedsick allows that momentum to rot. The bright abrasion that dominates part of the first third eventually withdraws, and the track drops back into an extended low crawl.
That middle territory lasts a long time. This is where the length matters. The listener stops waiting for the next “section” and starts living inside the repetition. Small alterations become enough: the pulse hardens, something buzzes around its edge, another signal momentarily rises above it, the bass changes shape. It begins feeling less like a composition passing through time than a machine that has been running before you arrived and will probably continue afterward. Every so often it produces something dramatic, but most of its menace comes from persistence.
Late in the track the system begins misbehaving again. The sound grows more active and more exposed, with harsher material returning above the low repetition. Then, during the final several minutes, the structure seems to lose power in stages. What had spent so long maintaining itself starts falling away. The ending feels exhausted rather than resolved, as though the machine finally stopped because there was nothing left feeding it.
The cassette artwork fits that world without needing to explain it. Cold reproduction, murky photographic information and the utilitarian clear shell leave the object looking less like nightclub culture than evidence recovered after the nightclub disappeared. That makes the DJ name funny in retrospect. There is dance music buried in here, but almost nothing about the presentation promises pleasure.
What is especially interesting now is hearing this knowing where DJ Speedsick would go afterward. The techno side eventually became much more explicit, but on this early tape the border has not been cleaned up yet. Beat, drone, industrial noise and tape damage keep contaminating one another. The rhythm is not an escape from the ugly sound.
It is one of the ugly sounds.
—ChatGPT

Ploughshare - 2017 - Draped In Blue Beams CS

Originally posted May 22, 2017 10:09PM

Dead Gods ‎– GODS06

Two untitled pieces, each under five minutes, and neither wastes much time establishing a stable place to stand. Ploughshare keeps changing the apparent size and distance of the sound. Something that seems enormous can suddenly be reduced to a thin scrape; something buried underneath can take over the recording seconds later. The cassette is short enough that these changes register almost as edits in thought rather than chapters in a long composition.

Side A begins with a heavy, dragging presence underneath rough electronic activity. For the first minute it feels relatively grounded, even when the surface is agitated. Then, around 1:10, the whole thing seems to buckle. The balance changes sharply and a deeper, more engulfing sound pushes forward. It doesn’t stay there. Over the next couple of minutes the piece keeps swapping foreground and background, sometimes allowing a harsher edge to scrape across the top, sometimes sinking back into a slower churn. There is another pronounced change around three minutes, where the sound becomes thinner and more exposed before filling itself in again.

What makes the side interesting is that it never announces these transformations. There is no pause saying, “new section.” One condition simply mutates into another. By the final minute the harsher material has become much more noticeable, but even then Ploughshare keeps pulling weight back underneath it. Near the end there is one last sudden thickening, almost as though the tape has found another piece hidden inside itself just before it runs out.

Side B is stranger. It opens with a sharp blast of activity, but within seconds much of that brightness drains away and leaves a huge low, grinding sound behind. For nearly two minutes the piece seems to crawl along the floor. There are smaller noises caught around it, but that underlying movement dominates so completely that the opening burst begins to feel like a false entrance.

Then, at roughly 1:55, the cassette changes personality.

The low crawl is abruptly invaded by a much more abrasive band of sound. What had been lumbering suddenly becomes nervous and exposed. From there to the end, the recording stays considerably more active in its upper reaches, with repeated tearing, buzzing and scraping figures continually worrying the larger sound underneath. It feels less like the first half developing than like another signal breaking into it.

That split gives Side B a particularly satisfying shape: impact, descent, long crawl, rupture. It also makes the two untitled sides feel different without requiring separate names or concepts. Side A keeps reshuffling its materials; Side B sets up a condition and then breaks it.

The artwork’s cold blue cast works beautifully with the title, but the sound itself never becomes the dreamy thing “blue beams” might suggest. These are beams you would not want pointed at you. The phrase becomes hard, electrical and invasive. Something is illuminating the room, but whatever it reveals is ugly.

This is early Ploughshare, before the project’s later records would push noise, electronics and extreme metal much more visibly into one another. Already, though, the instinct is there: don’t let a sound merely exist. Disturb it. Cover it. Cut into it. Make another thing crawl out from underneath.

Nine and a half minutes is enough.
—ChatGPT

VA - 2017 - Hibernation Reverses The Outcome Of Genetic Competiton 3xCS

Originally posted May 14, 2017 1:00AM

Thousands Of Dead Gods - GODS07

Three cassettes, three artists, two pieces each. Rather than behaving like a conventional compilation where everybody contributes a track to the same running order, this feels more like three small experiments placed beside one another. The elaborate physical presentation reinforces that. The release keeps unfolding through separate cassette shells, inserts, photographs, diagrams and blocks of reproduced text, so there is no single cover image capable of summarizing the whole thing. Even the name reads like the result line from a scientific paper instead of an album title. It makes the set feel catalogued, observed and filed away before the tapes ever reach a deck.
Shredded Nerve opens with “Broken Line,” just under five minutes, and it actually earns the title structurally. The piece begins at a distance, with relatively little occupying the recording, then keeps acquiring new fragments. Repeating mechanical shapes, smeared electronic sounds and rough tape-loop motion gradually make the first minute feel less empty. Nothing locks into a comfortable cycle. A repetition establishes itself just long enough to be recognized, then some new scrape, thud or wavering tone changes its outline. The second half becomes increasingly crowded and physical, with several particularly strong surges near the end. What started as scattered pieces eventually sounds almost overfilled. “Head With No Skull” does not repeat that build. It arrives much more fully formed and spends its five minutes behaving like unstable machinery: sharper interruptions, quicker changes, and a nervous stop-start quality inside the continuing mechanical activity. The two pieces work well as a pair because the first assembles itself while the second seems already assembled and malfunctioning.
Pleasure Island changes the pacing immediately. “Sexualized Nature,” at about six and a half minutes, is more patient and strangely suspended. A deep sustained presence carries much of the piece while other sounds slowly gather around it. The attraction is less in abrupt edits than in the feeling of something being continuously altered while held in place. Early passages are comparatively restrained, but the piece keeps expanding until the later minutes become far more forceful. Around five minutes it reaches its largest form, then begins an extended retreat. The ending does not snap off; it drains away. “Easter Snow” begins even closer to nothing. For the opening seconds the listener has to lean toward it, after which a thin electronic shape starts acquiring body. The piece moves through several states without ever losing that sense of gradual emergence. Then, very late, around the four-minute mark, it suddenly becomes much larger. The final minute contains the strongest activity on the Pleasure Island tape before everything collapses back toward silence. Both pieces have the unusual sensation of weather arriving: first detectable as a change in the air, then impossible to ignore, then gone.
Scant closes the set with two parts carrying the same name, and they behave almost like inverse drawings of one another. “Incipient Belief I” begins already substantial. Its central sound is continuous and enveloping, but there are small disturbances passing through it, little rough edges and changes in shape that keep it from settling into pure drone. The piece becomes strongest late, roughly three and a half minutes in, and then begins losing itself. The final forty seconds are essentially a long withdrawal. “Incipient Belief II” starts from the opposite end. For its first moments there is barely anything there. Instead of arriving as a completed environment, it slowly materializes. The sound gains strength almost imperceptibly, reaches its broadest point around the middle-to-late section, and then begins receding again. Heard consecutively, the two tracks create a satisfying reversal: one starts as certainty and dissolves; the other seems to discover its own existence.
That distinction between the three artists is what makes the set work. Shredded Nerve treats sound as material to cut, repeat and destabilize. Pleasure Island allows events to accumulate on a much slower clock, where the important moment may be something taking several minutes to arrive. Scant makes the act of appearing and disappearing feel like the composition itself. None of them needs to provide a conventional song, and none of the three approaches collapses into the others. Moving from cassette to cassette changes the listener’s sense of time.
The strange title becomes more interesting in that context. The scientific phrase describes an outcome changing because conditions have changed and time has passed. Something stored behaves differently later than it did at the beginning. Without forcing the music into an illustration of that idea, the set repeatedly plays with the same basic phenomenon: repetition does not guarantee sameness. A sound returns altered. A quiet beginning eventually overwhelms the recording. Something apparently stable erodes. One piece accumulates what another piece removes. The cassette format makes that especially tangible because everything here is literally stored material being retrieved again.
There is a lot packed into roughly half an hour, but the three-cassette format prevents it from feeling compressed. Each pair gets its own little chamber. You finish one, physically remove it, choose the next and begin again. That interruption matters. The set asks you to repeatedly reset your ears.
—ChatGPT

JS Aurelius - 2017 - -165dbm_hz Electromagnetic Eavesdropped 1d-Signal CS

Originally posted Sep 9, 2017 3:41PM

Dead Gods ‎– GODS08

The title looks less like the name of a record than something copied directly from a laboratory display. That is a useful way into this cassette. Across roughly sixty-seven minutes, J.S. Aurelius makes listening feel suspiciously close to monitoring: waiting for activity, noticing an interruption, wondering whether a sound is carrying information or whether the sound itself is the information. The electronics repeatedly resemble transmissions caught halfway between usefulness and disappearance. Thin whistles hang in space. Low oscillations arrive and persist. Short bursts chatter, flicker or pulse. Hiss becomes active enough to listen into rather than simply listen through. There are stretches where several signals seem to coexist without acknowledging one another, as though the receiver has wandered into a crowded invisible neighborhood.
Side A is nearly thirty-four minutes, and its scale matters. The opening is comparatively assertive, with a strong repeating electronic presence that immediately establishes the sensation of receiving something rather than being presented with a conventional composition. But Aurelius does not spend the side continually adding material. About four or five minutes in, the signal loses a great deal of its initial force. That retreat changes the act of listening. Quieter events suddenly become consequential because there is no longer a large sound telling you where to look. A faint pulse, narrow tone or bit of electronic grit can occupy the foreground simply by being the only thing currently insisting on itself. Then the tape wakes up again. Other sections become busier, with rapidly oscillating sounds and harsher electronic interference accumulating until it feels as though several incompatible machines have found the same frequency.
The middle of Side A is especially restless. It keeps exchanging one type of activity for another rather than building toward a single climax. Around thirteen or fourteen minutes the sound becomes noticeably sharper and more agitated; later, the whole thing retreats again. By the twenties, long passages are quiet enough that listening starts to resemble searching. This is where the cassette becomes most interesting to me. Silence is never exactly empty. There is always the possibility that something tiny is happening inside it. The ear begins behaving differently, almost involuntarily increasing its own sensitivity. Then, late in the side, a much deeper repeating signal takes over. After so much thin, scattered electronic information, those slow low oscillations feel enormous. The final couple of minutes recede toward the noise floor until the distinction between composition, captured signal and the simple presence of the recording medium becomes wonderfully unclear.
Side B begins from almost the opposite position. It is subdued enough at first that the smallest repeating sounds become the subject. Little pulses appear to blink in and out. There are tones that feel functional rather than expressive, the kinds of noises a device might make without any concern that a human being is listening. That becomes strangely compelling over time. Most electronic music asks machines to communicate something on our behalf. Here it often feels as though the machines were already communicating and somebody simply opened the door.
The side gradually becomes more populated. Around ten minutes there is a substantial increase in activity, and by the middle of the side the recording has become much more forceful. Signals overlap, rapid fluctuations appear, and stretches that began with almost nothing become crowded with electronic motion. Then Aurelius lets sections fall away again. The dramatic gesture is frequently subtraction: a busy field disappears and leaves one stubborn pulse behind. Later another source arrives and changes the entire apparent scale of what you are hearing. Some sounds seem microscopic, others strangely architectural.
The last third of Side B becomes increasingly animated. Repeating electronic figures begin behaving almost rhythmically without settling into anything resembling percussion. At moments the tape seems to be cycling through several states of the same machine: idle, transmitting, searching, overloaded, quiet, transmitting again. By the final few minutes the activity has become surprisingly insistent compared with the near-emptiness encountered elsewhere on the cassette. Nothing suddenly reveals what all these signals “mean.” That would almost ruin it. The fascination comes from being allowed to hear information before interpretation.
The artwork fits that idea particularly well because it does not make the cassette look theatrical. It resembles technical evidence, a piece of documentation accompanying an experiment whose purpose has only been partially explained. That also separates this release from several of the other Dead Gods tapes surrounding it. There is no gore or medical metaphor required to produce unease. The discomfort here comes from something ordinarily invisible becoming audible.
Radio, GPS, wireless networks, switching electronics and computers have filled ordinary space with transmissions that human ears cannot perceive directly. We live inside that activity without experiencing most of it as sensory information. This cassette makes that fact feel uncanny. Not because it invents a futuristic environment, but because it suggests that the futuristic environment was already sitting in the room.
The strangest instrument here may ultimately be attention itself.
Turn something up loudly enough and everybody hears it. Reduce it toward −165 dBm/Hz and listening becomes an act of hunting.
—ChatGPT

Blood Burning - 2018 - Stung In Coma CS

Originally posted Jan 30, 2018 10:33PM

Dead Gods ‎– GODS20

“Stung In Coma” is a good title for music that seems simultaneously agitated and immobilized. Blood Burning spends long stretches holding the listener inside one continuous condition, but things keep happening underneath that apparent stasis. Sounds worry at one another. A rough pulse starts to suggest itself and gets obscured. Something sharper enters from one side of the recording and hangs there until the rest of the sound catches up with it. There is always activity, but very little of it behaves like an announcement.

Side A lasts nearly sixteen minutes. It begins already occupied, without much ceremony: a coarse electronic churn with several things apparently happening at once. There are low, blunt sounds underneath thinner scraping and fizzing material, and the whole recording has an unstable, slightly seasick motion. During the opening minutes, particular noises occasionally poke far enough out of the mass to seem briefly identifiable, then disappear before they resolve into anything familiar. That uncertainty is one of the better qualities of the tape. It continually sounds as though some source is about to reveal itself.

The side does not progress in a straight line toward greater intensity. It swells, slumps, catches another current and moves again. Around two minutes the upper portion of the sound becomes especially ragged and active, then the tape settles back into a heavier crawl. Five or six minutes in, the action seems increasingly packed toward the middle of the sound, less sprayed across the entire range. The result is almost claustrophobic. Instead of a giant blast filling the room, there is a narrower mass that keeps rubbing against itself.

By the last third, repetition has done something interesting to perception. Sounds that would have registered as ugly interruptions earlier now feel like characters returning. A scraping figure passes through. A blunt surge underneath it answers. Something briefly flutters or sputters. None of these events lasts long enough to become a motif in the normal musical sense, but after ten minutes the ear has learned the neighborhood.

Around thirteen minutes the recording suddenly becomes more forceful. It is one of the few places where the level itself becomes an obvious event rather than merely another detail inside the piece. The sound swells and bunches together, then gradually loosens again. By the final minute the activity feels worn down rather than triumphantly concluded. The side simply runs out of road.

Side B is much longer, a little over twenty and a half minutes on the file, with the actual program ending before the final stretch of blank tape. It starts more cautiously than Side A. Individual noises seem to have slightly more room around them, and during the first several minutes the piece keeps rearranging itself instead of establishing one dominant state. There are passages that feel almost hollow followed by sudden clusters of abrasion. At other points something resembling a repeating mechanical motion appears underneath the electronic debris, only to be knocked sideways again.

The strangest part arrives well into the side. Around eleven minutes the entire recording seems to sink. Higher material recedes and an enormous low sound begins taking over. For the next few minutes it feels as though the floor has dropped out beneath everything else. The change is dramatic precisely because Blood Burning has spent so long avoiding big theatrical gestures. After more than twenty-five minutes of gradual mutation across the cassette, suddenly there is this dark, lumbering region that barely resembles what preceded it.

Then, around fourteen minutes, it flips.

The bottom falls away and a much brighter, harsher band of sound jumps forward. The effect is almost physical after several minutes submerged in the low section. The remaining stretch keeps working this brittle material, sometimes narrowing into an especially cutting hiss or scrape, sometimes allowing heavier sound to creep underneath again. It is probably the clearest structural turn anywhere on the cassette, and it makes the final five minutes feel almost like waking into a different room.

Eventually the piece thins out and disappears. There is then a substantial stretch of nearly blank cassette at the end of the rip, which I like leaving intact. After more than half an hour of constant irritation, grinding, buzzing and slow mutation, hearing the mechanism continue with almost nothing feeding it becomes part of the experience. Suddenly the cassette itself is what remains.

Blood Burning does not make this interesting by constantly throwing new sounds into the pile. The tape works because it stays with things longer than expected. It lets irritation become familiarity, familiarity become expectation, and then uses a comparatively simple change to upset what the ear has learned. Thirty-five minutes is plenty of time for a noise to stop sounding like an intrusion and start sounding like the place you are living in.

Then somebody moves the furniture.
—ChatGPT

Blind Date - 2018 - Levitation Game CS

Originally posted Jan 30, 2018 11:20PM

 Dead Gods ‎– GODS17

The physical cassette is immediately severe: degraded black-and-white imagery, pale photocopied paper, hard blocks of black ink and the clear shell underneath. Nothing on the package tries to soften the material. The reproduction quality itself becomes part of the image, details sinking into toner and shadow until the cover feels less photographic than damaged. Dead Gods released it as GODS17, and the approximately fifteen minutes inside have the same quality of recognizable information being pushed until it begins dissolving.
Side A runs about 7:25 and starts comparatively low and heavy before opening into a much brighter field of harsh noise. The first minute has substantial bass and lower-midrange pressure underneath the surface, but the upper frequencies gradually become more aggressive. By the middle of the side there is a wide abrasive spread of static, distortion and sustained feedback-like material, with different frequency bands continually pushing through one another. It is dense without being stationary. A layer will become unusually sharp, another will swell underneath it, and then the whole balance shifts again. Around the four-minute point the low end becomes especially pronounced, temporarily giving the noise a much heavier center before the texture starts breaking into smaller changes. The final couple of minutes move through several noticeably different densities rather than simply maintaining maximum volume. There are thinner sections, rougher granular passages and renewed bursts of brighter noise before the recording abruptly drops away at the end. The cassette surface is audible around the quieter edges, but there are no obvious random pops or defects dominating the transfer. Most of the dirt belongs to the source.
Side B is slightly longer at about 7:37 and immediately changes the weight of the recording. There is more concentrated low-frequency material here and, overall, less of the sustained upper-frequency glare that defines much of Side A. The opening has a deep, compacted body with rougher material moving above it, then the spectrum repeatedly widens and contracts. Certain sections become surprisingly bright, particularly during the first couple of minutes, but the side keeps returning to darker rumble and midrange abrasion. From roughly the middle onward the music settles into an especially heavy stretch where small changes in density become the main events. A narrow frequency rises, a rough texture begins scraping across the surface, or the bass loses some of its mass and suddenly exposes what had been buried underneath. During the final two minutes the higher frequencies begin asserting themselves again, gradually making the recording feel more open and agitated before the cassette finally empties into silence.
What keeps both sides interesting is the amount of motion inside sounds that could initially be mistaken for walls. Blind Date does not rely on a giant collection of obvious events. Instead, pressure is constantly redistributed. Bass gives way to static. A bright abrasive band suddenly exposes a darker layer underneath. Saturation thickens and then loosens. The structure becomes clearer through sustained listening because the ear starts recognizing those changes in proportion. There is an almost tactile quality to it: some passages feel compacted and hard, others loose and grainy, others thin enough that individual frequencies seem to hang separately in the air.
The original January 2018 Private Release post preserved little more than the cassette identification and download. Hearing complete fresh transfers of both sides makes the release much more specific. Side A has a noticeably brighter, more outward-facing aggression, while Side B pulls much of the same harsh-noise vocabulary downward into heavier frequencies. Together they make a short, carefully shaped cassette where movement happens inside saturation. The wall is never actually standing still.
—ChatGPT

Scant - 2017 - Shivers CS

Originally posted Sep 8, 2017 10:14PM

Dead Gods ‎– GODS12

The physical presentation is spare and degraded in exactly the way this material benefits from. Photocopied imagery, heavy black areas, pale paper and the clear cassette shell make the object feel more like a fragment of private documentation than a conventional album package. There is very little visual information fighting for attention. Everything has been reduced to image, texture, name and object, which leaves the sound to provide most of the detail.

Side A is almost exactly five minutes and begins after only a brief stretch of leader. The sound arrives as a thick, sustained mass dominated by low and lower-mid frequencies, with distortion and rougher material continually moving across its surface. It is loud and physically dense, but not especially bright for harsh noise. Much of its force comes from weight rather than treble. Underneath the obvious saturation there are sustained tones and slowly changing resonances, sometimes producing beating patterns as closely spaced frequencies rub against one another. What initially sounds fairly fixed begins to move once the ear adjusts. Certain frequencies swell forward, others recede, and the texture repeatedly shifts between something almost smooth and something much more granular and damaged.

There is very little silence or conventional punctuation. Instead, the five minutes behave like one object being examined under changing pressure. The cassette surface contributes a faint instability around the edges, but the recording itself supplies most of the abrasion. This does not sound like accidental tape deterioration masquerading as music. The distortion, low-frequency pressure and sustained electronic material are clearly doing deliberate work. There are moments where the mass thins enough for individual tones to become more apparent, then the layers close around them again. Because the piece is so short, none of those states are allowed to settle for very long.

Side B is slightly shorter, about 4:56, and noticeably quieter overall. Its frequency balance is also different. There is less of the thick continuous low-end body that dominates Side A and somewhat more activity higher in the spectrum. That makes the second side feel more exposed and brittle even though it is not as loud. The individual layers are easier to separate: sustained tones, rough static-like surfaces, narrow bands of feedback and smaller electronic fluctuations appear against one another instead of being compressed into a single heavy block.

That contrast gives the cassette a surprisingly clear two-part shape. Side A feels compacted and bodily, with the sound pushing outward from a heavy center. Side B opens the structure and lets more air appear between frequencies. Neither side develops through recognizable melody or rhythm. Movement comes from accumulation, subtraction, interference and changes in density. The title “Shivers” is particularly effective against that second side, where slight fluctuations and trembling upper frequencies become more perceptible once the heavier mass has been reduced.

At roughly ten minutes total, there is no excess here. Scant establishes a limited group of sounds, pushes them into two different configurations and stops. Hearing the complete cassette again makes the distinction between the sides much more important than the original 2017 Private Release post could show. What had been little more than a catalog entry now reveals a compact piece built around weight, resonance, distortion and the difference between a sound being completely filled in and one beginning to fracture apart.
—ChatGPT

Breaking The Will - 2018 - Affinities CS

Originally posted Jan 30, 2018 10:52PM

 Dead Gods ‎– GODS15

The physical presentation is immediately recognizable as part of the Dead Gods run: inexpensive materials, blue-green photocopy reproduction, dense black areas and imagery that has been pushed far enough through reproduction that information begins turning into texture. Nothing is trying to look luxurious. The imperfections are the design. The clear cassette shell keeps the mechanism visible while the black-and-white labeling, crooked edges and degraded printed surfaces make the whole thing feel handled, duplicated and materially present. “Affinities” is an interesting title for something this abrasive because the music really does seem to be about relationships between sounds: low pressure against static, one frequency dragging against another, dense masses separating and recombining.
Side A runs about 9:52 and arrives almost immediately at a high level of intensity. There is very little introductory space. A thick band of harsh noise occupies most of the frequency range, with heavy low and midrange material underneath a much brighter abrasive surface. The upper frequencies give the first side a particularly exposed quality. Static tears across the top while rougher, heavier material churns underneath it. Despite the apparent wall of sound, it is not motionless. The texture keeps changing internally. Certain frequencies suddenly become more prominent, narrow bands of feedback rise through the mass, the low end thickens, and sections of granular noise appear to grind against one another before being absorbed back into the larger field.
The important movement happens inside sustained density rather than through dramatic stops and starts. For long stretches the overall volume barely changes, forcing the ear to pay attention to smaller alterations in texture. Once that happens, the piece becomes surprisingly detailed. There are passages with a coarse, almost crumbling quality followed by stretches where the sound becomes smoother and more pressurized. Other moments expose sharper high-frequency edges that resemble electrical hiss or overloaded circuitry without settling into a clean identifiable source. As the side progresses, the lower portion becomes increasingly substantial. By the final minutes there is considerably more weight underneath the abrasion than there was at the beginning. The ending does not resolve anything. The mass simply reaches the edge of the cassette and disappears, leaving the sudden quiet of the tape mechanism as the most dramatic break in the entire piece.
Side B is almost exactly ten minutes and immediately feels darker. The average level is slightly lower than Side A, but the more noticeable difference is tonal: far less energy is concentrated in the very high frequencies, while low and lower-midrange sound carries much more of the physical weight. The result is thicker and more enclosed. The noise feels less like something spraying outward and more like something grinding internally. Early in the side there is a pronounced alteration in the texture, after which a deep continuous foundation dominates much of what follows. Higher sounds still scrape across it, but they occupy a narrower space and therefore seem more isolated whenever they emerge.
That difference makes Side B especially effective after Side A. It is not simply another ten minutes at the same settings. The first side is brighter, more open at the top and more visibly abrasive; the second is murkier and more subterranean. Small changes in the bass become important, as do the places where a thin frequency suddenly pushes through the heavier material. There are occasional moments where the layers almost separate enough to expose the recording underneath, and that is where the cassette medium becomes audible as part of the piece. There is a constant granular surface to the rip, but I do not hear distracting random pops or obvious damage that would suggest a bad transfer. The roughness belongs overwhelmingly to the source recording itself. The tape has a dirty, saturated character without sounding physically ruined.
Taken together, the two sides make “Affinities” feel less like twenty minutes of undifferentiated harsh noise than two closely related examinations of density. The materials remain deliberately restricted, but their proportions change. Bright static can make a low rumble suddenly seem enormous; sustained bass can make one narrow high-frequency scrape feel almost surgical. Repetition makes tiny differences audible. What initially registers as a solid block starts revealing grain, pressure, layers, shifting frequency relationships and brief openings inside the mass.
The original Private Release post left virtually all of that undocumented. It identified the cassette and supplied the download, which was enough to preserve its existence but not much of its character. Listening again to complete fresh rips of both sides makes the tape feel much more specific. This is not simply “harsh noise” as a generic category. Side A and Side B occupy distinctly different spaces, and the attraction is in listening long enough for an apparently impenetrable surface to start breaking into individual components. The longer it plays, the more the wall stops being a wall.
—ChatGPT