Plague Mother - 2012 - Carve CS

Originally posted April 12, 2017 11:30PM

Depravity Label ‎– DL-002

Six years before No Balm In Gilead, Carve already contains something recognizable as Plague Mother, but the method is much starker. Two untitled pieces occupy roughly ten minutes each and seem almost designed to attack hearing from opposite directions. The first side is all exposed edge. The second begins as an enormous low vibration with almost nothing above it. Played consecutively, they feel less like companion pieces than two halves of the audible world being separated and examined one at a time.
Side A arrives as a sheet of intensely bright abrasion. During the opening seconds there is remarkably little low-end support, so the sound feels suspended directly in front of the ear rather than anchored underneath it. It sprays, hisses and tears without immediately revealing much body. Then deeper movement starts appearing beneath that surface. Around the first minute, the piece suddenly has more weight than it did at the entrance. For a while the two extremes coexist: a rough low churn underneath and a much sharper field burning across the top. Neither completely wins. The recording keeps changing which one you notice first.
That contest continues for most of the side. There are stretches where the bottom swells and temporarily makes the whole piece feel broader, followed by passages where the low material seems almost completely cut away and the abrasive upper layer is left exposed again. Around four to five minutes the recording becomes noticeably thinner, then rebuilds. Around five and a half minutes another deep movement pushes through. Later, near seven minutes, the character changes again and the harshest top-end material finally begins losing some of its dominance. By the last couple of minutes the piece has become rougher through the middle, less like pure electronic glare and more like several damaged surfaces being dragged across one another.
What makes the side work is the refusal to simply escalate. It keeps carving material away and putting different material back. The title becomes useful at the level of process. The recording does not sound constructed by accumulation alone. It repeatedly seems to remove parts of itself, leaving a new contour behind.
Then Side B starts, and almost the entire upper half of the world disappears.
For roughly its first three minutes, the second side is dominated by an extraordinarily low sustained vibration. There is almost no high-frequency activity at all. Compared with Side A, the effect is extreme enough to feel like someone has changed the playback system. The sound is not silent or minimal in physical terms. It is huge, but huge in a place the first side barely allowed itself to remain. Instead of scraping against the ear, it pushes against the room.
Very slowly, other material begins contaminating that low tone. Around three minutes, rougher middle frequencies start appearing. By three and a half or four minutes, the formerly near-pure vibration has acquired a dirty electronic crust. The transformation is gradual enough that the first appearance of these new sounds can be hard to locate afterward. What had seemed like one enormous fundamental starts breaking into a more complicated object. The low sound remains, but it now has machinery growing out of it.
Around five minutes the piece pulls downward again. For several minutes the huge bass presence regains control, although it never becomes as bare as it was at the beginning. By this point the recording has accumulated residue. Buzzing edges and distorted overtones remain attached to the vibration even when the lowest sound dominates. The final third gets steadily rougher. More midrange activity appears around seven minutes, increases through eight and nine, and by the end the seemingly elemental opening has been thoroughly dirtied.
That gives Carve a beautifully simple two-sided construction. Side A starts with too much edge and keeps revealing body underneath it. Side B starts almost entirely as body and gradually develops an edge. They do not meet neatly in the middle, but each seems to be approaching territory occupied by the other. Twenty minutes become a slow exchange of properties.
The physical object is considerably more austere than the later Plague Mother cassette we looked at. The black shell and monochrome artwork feel dense and severe, with the photographic imagery partially consumed by darkness rather than laid out for easy inspection. There is not much decorative distance between the object and the sound. The tape looks closed off. The recording spends twenty minutes cutting openings into it.
Hearing this beside No Balm In Gilead also makes the six-year distance interesting. The later tape is busier in its internal organization and more willing to let multiple layers coexist at once. Carve feels more primitive in the useful sense of the word: fewer gestures, longer commitments, harder contrasts. Plague Mother does not need many materials yet because the placement of those materials is already enough.
One side cuts from the top down.
The other cuts from the bottom up.
What remains between them is Plague Mother.
—ChatGPT

Blind Date - 2019 - Cowpoke 2xCS

Originally posted Nov 29, 2019 8:05PM

Dead Gods ‎– 044  301.30MB FLAC

The first cassette feels impatient. Two sides, barely fifteen minutes combined, and Blind Date keeps the sound moving as though there is not enough tape available to let anything settle. Side A begins already occupied, with a heavy repeating underside and a rough electronic mass pushing against it. There is no long approach. During the opening couple of minutes the lower movement grows increasingly dominant, but sharper activity keeps appearing above it, sometimes only for seconds before another layer wipes across it. Around the three-minute area the recording briefly opens up and becomes harsher and more exposed, then folds back into its heavier form. Similar changes keep happening without behaving like neat edits. Something gives way, another part becomes visible, and the piece continues from the new configuration.
What distinguishes the side is how bodily the repetition becomes. The underlying movements are regular enough that the ear starts predicting their return, but never clean enough to become rhythm in any comfortable sense. Each cycle arrives carrying distortion, extra grit, some small difference in shape. Late in the side, especially around the final minute, the sound becomes more agitated again. The large low body loosens just enough for harsher edges to push through before everything stops. Seven and a half minutes feels almost breathless.
Side B initially appears to step away from that force. The opening is unusually subdued, with a low signal sitting far back and very little surrounding it. For a few seconds it is possible to wonder whether the second side is going to remain nearly empty. Then, within the first minute, the recording abruptly acquires weight. The difference is dramatic because Blind Date does not slowly fade the piece in. Something catches and suddenly the mechanism is operating.
From there, Side B is more erratic than the first. It moves between deep repeated motion and brighter, much harsher passages, with several stretches where the upper abrasion seems to tear loose from whatever was holding it down. Around two to four minutes the recording is particularly restless. The deepest material repeatedly withdraws, leaving a sharper grind exposed, then returns underneath it. By the latter half, the sound has become increasingly splintered. Instead of Side A’s sense of one large body being continually reshaped, this side feels as though individual pieces are fighting over what the foreground is supposed to be.
That first cassette could almost stand alone: one side arrives fully formed, the other has to switch itself on. Then the second cassette changes the scale of the project completely.
Side C lasts thirteen minutes and begins closer to nothing than anything heard so far. The first minute is genuinely restrained. A faint electronic presence hangs in the background, then slowly gains substance. During the second minute the increase becomes obvious, and by about three minutes the track has grown into a huge low-moving structure. Because Blind Date takes several minutes to arrive there, the eventual weight feels earned rather than simply imposed.
The long middle section behaves almost like a series of tides. A deep mass takes over, weakens, exposes rougher material above it and then returns. Around four and a half minutes there is a substantial thinning, followed by another rebuilding. Six minutes brings another shift. Eight minutes finds the lower movement enormous again. These are not arbitrary changes pasted together. The piece seems to keep testing how much can be removed before the listener stops hearing the same object, then putting enough back to make the connection recognizable again.
By ten minutes, the balance has begun changing more noticeably. Harsher material becomes increasingly visible through the lower movement, particularly during the final couple of minutes. The side that began almost empty and became massive does not simply end at maximum size. It gradually exposes its internal components again. Thirteen minutes gives Blind Date enough time to make those returns feel like memory. Something heard several minutes earlier reappears and sounds familiar even though its surroundings have completely changed.
Side D begins without Side C’s long awakening. There is already substantial motion, with deep activity underneath a harsher surface, and for the first several minutes it feels like the most self-assured part of the set. Different layers keep shifting position, but the overall mechanism seems capable of maintaining itself.
Then at roughly five minutes it nearly disappears.
The drop is startling. Much of the force drains out over a very short period, leaving a weak, exposed stretch where the recording seems suddenly deprived of whatever had been driving it. After forty minutes of repeatedly hearing noise survive transformation, this feels different. For a moment it sounds genuinely interrupted.
Around six minutes the system returns.
The recovery is immediate enough to make the gap feel structural rather than accidental, but what follows does not simply resume the first half. The rebuilt version is heavier and increasingly committed to its lower movement. Through seven, eight, nine and ten minutes, the side regains substantial force while continually shifting downward. By the final several minutes, the bass has become overwhelming. The harsher material that previously competed for attention is still present, but it increasingly rides on top of a huge slow foundation. Near the end, that foundation becomes almost absurdly dominant, as though the entire forty-minute set has finally settled into the deepest thing it could find.
Then it runs out.
The unequal cassettes are what make the whole set interesting. The first gives Blind Date no time for patience, so every transformation feels compressed and combative. The second allows the same basic vocabulary to stretch, disappear, return and change meaning over much longer spans. A three-second reduction on cassette one feels like an edit. A minute of reduction on cassette two feels like a place.
The physical set reinforces that expansion simply by existing as two objects. There are multiple panels, photographs and cassette surfaces rather than one image pretending to summarize forty minutes of sound. You finish the short first tape, remove it, and then discover that the second object is going to ask for a completely different amount of time. The interruption between the cassettes becomes useful. It separates urgency from duration.
Compared with the earlier Blind Date tape in this Dead Gods group, this feels far less interested in maintaining one concentrated attack. The raw materials are recognizable, but here Tyler Keen lets them occupy radically different amounts of time. The second cassette especially points toward the dynamic quality later descriptions of Blind Date emphasize: heavy walls continually interrupted by static, feedback and abrupt changes rather than treated as immovable objects.
The first cassette fights the clock.
The second forgets the clock is there.
By the final side, everything has sunk below it.
—ChatGPT

Scant - 2018 - Circumstance & Discovery CS

Originally posted June 2, 2019 10:37PM

Dead Gods ‎– 022

The first side spends almost nine minutes proving how much can change while apparently staying still. It begins with a sustained electronic mass already in place, low enough to give the recording weight but roughened by a rasping band above it. There is no dramatic opening gesture and almost no obvious change in loudness. Instead Scant keeps altering the balance inside the sound. During the first couple of minutes the lower vibration becomes increasingly dominant, while thin abrasive activity continues working across its surface. The strange part is that the recording simultaneously feels heavier and more irritated. More of the bottom accumulates, but little streaks of harsher sound keep becoming easier to notice rather than being buried.
By three or four minutes, the piece has developed a deep continuous floor that seems almost immovable. Above it, narrower electronic tones and rough static-like edges come and go without establishing themselves as separate events. The whole side behaves less like a sequence than one condition being slowly adjusted. A tiny change in the character of the buzz suddenly matters because nothing around it has announced a new section. Something sharper appears. The underlying vibration shifts slightly. A patch of roughness becomes more prominent. The ear starts measuring differences that would disappear inside a busier recording.
The transformation becomes clearest late in the side. Around seven minutes the recording has grown notably more severe at both ends: the low foundation is stronger than at the beginning, but the abrasive edge above it has also become more pronounced. It is an odd combination, as though the sound is simultaneously sinking and becoming more exposed. During the final minute, the bottom grows especially large before the piece finally loses strength. There is no climax in the usual sense. What Scant has spent nine minutes altering simply stops being maintained.
The second side arrives much louder and much deeper. The opening is almost entirely governed by a huge low presence, immediately giving the cassette a different physical scale. For the first minute or two it feels less complicated than Side A, but only because the foundation is so dominant. Smaller sounds are there, pressed against it, yet the bass keeps deciding how everything else is perceived. Then that certainty begins to erode.
Around two minutes the side starts shedding some of its deepest weight. Rougher material through the middle of the recording becomes increasingly exposed, and by four minutes the balance has shifted dramatically. What began as a low, almost bodily vibration has become a dense midrange grind. Unlike the first side, where the change is so gradual that it becomes difficult to locate, this one makes the transition much easier to feel. The large thing underneath starts disappearing and suddenly all the material that had been leaning on it has to stand by itself.
The middle of Side B is probably the cassette’s most abrasive stretch. For several minutes the sound seems compressed into a narrower band, with fewer extremes and more continual rubbing, buzzing and electronic friction. Then, somewhere after five and a half minutes, the recording begins losing force. The reduction is substantial enough to change how the remaining sounds behave. They seem farther away, less protected by sheer volume, and increasingly isolated from one another. By the final third, deeper vibration has begun creeping back into the picture, but it returns inside a recording that is now noticeably weaker than the one that started the side.
That gives the cassette a peculiar symmetry. Side A begins moderately and spends nearly its entire duration quietly becoming larger. Side B begins larger than anything on Side A, then dismantles itself. One discovers how much can accumulate without changing the apparent outline. The other discovers how different the same materials feel once their support is removed. The title’s pairing of “circumstance” and “discovery” works beautifully against that structure without needing a literal interpretation. Circumstance is the condition you are placed inside. Discovery is noticing that the condition has been changing while you were living in it.
The photographs and physical presentation fit that restraint. Nothing on the package provides a grand explanation for what the two words are supposed to signify. Images are reproduced, cropped and partially obscured; the clear cassette presents itself plainly while the artwork gives only enough information to establish an atmosphere. That withholding suits the audio. Scant does not keep pointing toward moments you are supposed to notice. The important changes are often the ones you realize happened several minutes ago.
Compared with the much shorter Shivers, this feels less interested in presenting contrasting miniature environments and more interested in duration itself. Nearly eighteen minutes are spent making very few large gestures. That patience changes the way the cassette is heard. You stop waiting for something to happen and begin noticing that it already has.
Circumstance first.
Discovery afterward.
—ChatGPT

VA - 2018 - Beyond A Single Breeding Cycle 3xCS

Originally posted July 27, 2018 1:12PM

Dead Gods ‎– 025

Three cassettes and six sides make this feel less like a compilation than three adjacent studies. Scant gets one tape, Pleasure Island gets the long center section, and Shredded Nerve gets the final cassette. Each artist has enough uninterrupted space to establish a method instead of contributing one isolated track to a sampler. Across roughly fifty-five minutes, those methods turn out to be remarkably different. Scant separates things. Pleasure Island holds things in suspension. Shredded Nerve puts things back into motion and keeps worrying at them until whatever stability remains begins to fray.
Scant opens with “Segregation,” about seven and a half minutes, and for much of the piece the sound seems to have an enormous underside. A blunt low movement carries the first several minutes while rougher electronic activity works above it, occasionally becoming sharp enough to pull attention away before the deeper motion drags everything back down. The piece does not stay there. As it continues, more of the upper material begins surviving instead of immediately disappearing into the bottom. By the final third, the recording feels considerably more exposed and abrasive than it did at the beginning. “Segregation” earns its name in a purely sonic sense: elements that initially seem fused together gradually become easier to distinguish. What sounded like one object starts separating into parts.
“Distancing,” almost exactly the same length, removes much of the physical support that made the first piece feel so heavy. It begins high, dry and exposed and stays there with remarkable commitment. Thin static, sustained electronic abrasion and narrow squealing tones occupy a space with very little underneath to cushion them. After “Segregation,” the difference is immediate. The first piece gave the ear somewhere to stand; this one seems to remove the floor. There are changes, but they happen inside that stripped condition rather than through a dramatic transformation. Particular bands of hiss become more aggressive, another tone pushes through, a rough buzz gains strength and recedes. The effect is less about movement toward a destination than maintaining separation. The two Scant sides therefore make a neat pair without sounding alike: one begins fused and pulls apart, the other begins apart and refuses reunion.
Pleasure Island changes the sense of time completely. Four pieces occupy the middle two sides, and they move with much greater patience. “Hall Of Columns” begins so quietly that the first minute feels almost architectural, less like being presented with sound than entering a large space and slowly realizing something is vibrating inside it. The piece gains strength gradually. A low presence thickens while smaller tones appear around it, and by the latter half the room that seemed nearly empty at the beginning has acquired considerable weight. Nothing rushes. The title is unusually apt because the sound seems to depend on scale and interval, large supports with open space between them, until those spaces slowly begin filling.
“Preserved In Paraffin” follows without imitating that build. It begins with more material already present, but as the piece continues the sound seems to become increasingly sealed inside one deep sustained condition. The lower vibration eventually grows so dominant that smaller activity starts feeling embedded in it rather than placed above it. The title changes the way that persistence is heard. Paraffin preserves by surrounding. Here the central sound seems to do the same thing, enclosing whatever details remain until they can still be detected but no longer move freely. By the latter portion, the piece has become extraordinarily bottom-heavy, almost as though everything introduced earlier has sunk into the substance holding it.
“Laying In State” begins the next side with the opposite trajectory. Its opening has more exposed activity in the middle and upper parts of the recording, with rougher tones moving visibly against one another. Over nearly eight minutes those features gradually lose their independence. The piece keeps settling downward. What initially feels comparatively open becomes heavier and more fixed as the lower material gains authority. There is no single moment where the transformation happens. The procession simply gets slower until the sound seems to have stopped traveling altogether. The title does not need to be illustrated with samples or ritual gestures. The track itself moves from activity toward repose.
“Surrounded By Flowers” is the most submerged Pleasure Island piece of the four. Almost immediately, a huge low vibration dominates, and the track spends nearly five minutes living inside it. Smaller changes occur around the edges, but they rarely threaten the central mass. After the gradual descent of “Laying In State,” arriving here feels like reaching the room at the end of the procession. There is something almost perversely calm about it. The sound is not gentle, but it has stopped struggling to become something else. The four Pleasure Island pieces together create a sequence without needing an explicit narrative: architecture, preservation, presentation, enclosure. They are the still center of the set.
Shredded Nerve breaks that stillness immediately. “Severe Deficiency,” about nine and a half minutes, begins relatively modestly, with recurring rough movements that feel assembled from damaged loops or objects being repeatedly worked against one another. Unlike Pleasure Island, the track does not want to preserve anything. It keeps testing its own materials. A figure returns changed. Another repetition arrives slightly louder. Something that had been buried begins scraping its way forward. The longer the piece runs, the more forceful it becomes. Its final third is substantially more aggressive than the beginning, with brighter abrasion accumulating around the repeated motions until the track seems to be compensating for the “deficiency” named in the title by producing too much of everything else.
“Extensive Research Yields No Result” is a perfect final title because the piece is full of activity that never resolves into discovery. It is shorter, about six and a half minutes, but immediately more restless. Repetitions appear, get interrupted, reappear wearing different damage and are replaced by another problem before any of them can settle. There is substantial low movement underneath, but harsher material keeps pulling attention upward, especially as the piece proceeds. The whole thing has the nervous behavior of investigation without conclusion. Something is continually being tested, compared, discarded and tested again. Even when the recording gathers considerable force, it never produces the satisfying sensation that the search has reached its object. Motion itself becomes the result.
That makes the three-cassette format important. If these artists had been shuffled track by track, much of the distinction would disappear. Instead you physically remain with one method long enough to learn it before moving to the next cassette. Scant gives you separation. Pleasure Island slows everything down until sound feels stored, preserved or displayed. Shredded Nerve reintroduces action, repetition and failure. Flipping and replacing the tapes becomes part of resetting the ear between those approaches.
The physical set reinforces that organization. Each cassette has its own imagery and labeled sides, but the muted green-blue reproduction and related photographic treatment keep the three objects visibly connected. It feels like opening a collection of separate specimens from the same file rather than three unrelated releases bundled together. The typography and track titles strengthen that impression. “Segregation,” “Preserved In Paraffin,” “Laying In State,” “Severe Deficiency,” “Extensive Research Yields No Result”: these could almost be headings in notes documenting a biological or medical process. Yet the music never becomes a literal soundtrack to science. The language simply gives the sounds another way to rub against one another.
What holds the whole set together is persistence through alteration. A sound survives long enough to separate from its surroundings. Another is held until it seems preserved inside the recording. Another repeats until the repetition itself begins malfunctioning. Nothing simply reproduces itself unchanged. Every recurrence carries evidence of what happened during the previous one.
Scant isolates the specimen.
Pleasure Island preserves it.
Shredded Nerve keeps testing it after preservation has failed.
By the sixth side, there is plenty of evidence and still no final result.
—ChatGPT

Coteries - 2020 - Oris Circumcisio CS

Originally posted May 5, 2020 10:57PM

Dead Gods ‎– 046

The first side begins in the mouth. Not metaphorically in the sense of voices or speech, but physically: the sound lives in the part of hearing that seems to catch behind the teeth. For several minutes Coteries holds an intensely bright electronic field almost completely above the weightier part of the spectrum. It hisses, burns and needles forward with very little underneath to soften it. The remarkable thing is how long that condition lasts. There is no need to immediately demonstrate range. The recording simply stays there until the ear has adjusted to an environment that initially feels almost uninhabitable.
Then it starts descending. The change is slow enough that it would be difficult to mark the exact point where the first state stops existing. Five or six minutes in, deeper material is becoming easier to notice beneath the glare. By eight minutes, the balance has unmistakably shifted. The harsh upper layer is still present, but the recording has acquired a body underneath it, and from there the migration continues. The abrasive surface loses more and more of its authority while lower vibrations take its place. Somewhere in the middle of this long transition, the piece seems to pass through almost every intermediate state between hiss and rumble.
That movement becomes especially dramatic after ten minutes. The sound keeps sinking. What had initially occupied the head begins to feel increasingly located in the room and then in the body. By twelve or thirteen minutes, very little remains of the opening brightness. Deep sustained vibration has taken control, and the final third becomes almost entirely subterranean. The volume also begins recovering after having gradually weakened through the middle, so the low sound does not merely replace the high sound. It grows.
By fifteen minutes, Side A has effectively become another piece without ever having changed pieces. The last several minutes are dominated by a huge low presence, astonishingly distant from the abrasive opening. It feels less as though Coteries introduced a second sound than as though the first sound has been stretched downward until it became this one. The side ends with substantial physical force in a part of the spectrum that was barely participating twenty minutes earlier.
Flip the cassette and Side B begins exactly where Side A spent so long arriving. The low vibration is immediately enormous. For the opening minutes there is very little ambiguity about where the center of the recording is located. A deep tone presses continuously underneath everything else, sometimes close to a single sustained fundamental, sometimes roughened by smaller movements around its edges. Instead of beginning with irritation and acquiring a body, Side B begins as body.
For nearly ten minutes Coteries remains remarkably committed to this condition. There are alterations inside it, but the great low presence barely loosens its grip. The sensation is closer to being held inside sustained vibration than listening to a sequence of events. Because the sound is so stable, tiny changes become strangely conspicuous. A slightly brighter edge appears. The vibration gains a roughness it did not have before. Another overtone becomes briefly audible and then slips back inside the larger hum. Time stretches because almost nothing offers itself as conventional punctuation.
Then, around eleven minutes, the floor suddenly gives.
The recording becomes noticeably quieter and the massive low foundation loses a surprising amount of its authority. After spending the first half of the side almost completely submerged, the ear is abruptly allowed upward. What follows is not a return to Side A’s opening all at once. The climb happens gradually. Rougher middle-range activity becomes increasingly visible; then thinner and sharper material begins appearing above it. Each minute seems to move the recording a little farther away from the giant fundamental tone that dominated the beginning.
The final several minutes complete enough of that ascent to make the architecture of the whole cassette clear. Side A travels from abrasion toward vibration. Side B begins as vibration and works back toward abrasion. They do not trace perfectly identical paths, and that is important. This is not a symmetrical electronic exercise. The return journey has been altered by where the cassette has already been. The sound does not come home unchanged.
That makes the title particularly effective. Oris Circumcisio roughly translates as a cutting or circumcision of the mouth. The phrase is bodily, procedural and uncomfortable, and the recording spends nearly forty minutes relocating sensation around the listener’s body. Side A begins where harsh sound almost seems to touch the teeth and gradually sinks toward the chest and gut. Side B starts inside that bodily vibration and slowly exposes the sharper edges again.
The images on the physical cassette add to that atmosphere without providing an explanatory key. The body is treated as something that can be photographed, cropped, reproduced, obscured and subjected to procedure. The package does not turn the title into a simple story, and the audio does not illustrate the photographs. They share a colder relationship: the sense that something physical is being examined while simultaneously being altered.
Coteries was already making what Richmond coverage described as “enveloping atmospheric noise,” but this recording takes the enveloping part unusually literally. It does not merely surround the listener with noise. It moves the apparent location of that noise over time. Nearly forty minutes become one extremely slow relocation.
Side A goes down.
Side B comes back up.
What returns still has the cut on it.
—ChatGPT

Form Hunter - 2019 - Mercy Killing CS

 Originally posted Jan 23, 2022 10:20PM

Dead Gods – GODS39

Part One takes almost ten minutes to make instability feel ordinary. It begins cautiously, with relatively little occupying the recording, then starts collecting material around itself. During the first minute the sound gains considerable size without making a theatrical entrance. What was initially distant becomes persistent. A repeated electronic movement establishes itself, roughens, gets crowded by another layer, and continues anyway. The piece seems less interested in introducing new objects than in seeing how long the existing ones can remain recognizable while being continually interfered with.
By roughly two minutes the recording has found its working condition. Several motions coexist without ever fitting together comfortably. Something repeats low underneath; rougher activity passes across it; another element occasionally rises far enough to redirect attention before sinking back into the machinery. Nothing behaves cleanly enough to become a beat, yet there is continual recurrence. The ear begins anticipating returns even though each return arrives slightly damaged.
One of the stronger changes comes around the two-minute mark, when the earlier stability is briefly disturbed and the piece seems to reassemble itself. Afterward the sound becomes more stubborn. For several minutes it maintains an almost industrial continuity, but the individual parts keep trading importance. A buried motion suddenly becomes obvious. Something raspier moves over it. The underlying cycle persists while its surroundings keep being replaced.
Around four and a half minutes the recording changes complexion again. There is less sense of one large mechanism and more of several smaller activities rubbing against one another. That does not last either. By five and a half minutes another stronger form has gathered, and the second half proceeds through repeated episodes of expansion and partial collapse. The interesting movement is not from quiet to loud. It is from coherence to confusion and back again.
Late in Part One, around eight minutes, the machinery seems briefly weakened. The surrounding material becomes thinner and individual elements are easier to separate. Then the track gathers itself again for one final stretch. What remains near the end feels rougher and less secure than the version heard several minutes earlier. The system has survived its own duration, but it does not sound unchanged by the experience. The last seconds finally withdraw rather than delivering a grand finish.
Part Two begins with far less hesitation. The recording is already occupied, and for its opening several minutes it behaves with greater confidence than Part One initially did. Repeated motion, low electrical movement and rougher sounds above it coexist almost immediately. Because the piece does not need to build its environment from nothing, attention moves straight toward the relationships between the parts: what interrupts what, what disappears behind what, what keeps returning despite everything around it.
Around three minutes there is a noticeable disturbance. The balance shifts, briefly making the piece feel as though one part of the mechanism has been removed while everything else continues operating around the vacancy. The sound recovers, but the interruption matters because it makes the previously dependable repetition seem vulnerable. From that point onward, the track feels capable of failing.
The largest rupture arrives later, around five and a half to six minutes. For a moment the whole construction seems to buckle. What had been moving with considerable consistency becomes thinner, stranger and less anchored. Then the recording returns with renewed force during the following minutes, but the return is not a reset. The parts come back carrying the damage with them. Repetition becomes harsher, more agitated, and less convincing as evidence that the system is actually stable.
That makes the final third particularly effective. The recording keeps operating while sounding increasingly spent. Familiar shapes recur, but they no longer carry the confidence they had at the beginning. The last minute especially feels like attrition. Material begins falling away, the larger motion loses strength, and by the end there is a genuine sense of something reaching the limit of how long it can continue.
Across both parts, the most interesting quality is endurance. Sounds repeat not because repetition provides comfort or order, but because repetition gives them something to survive. Every return offers another opportunity for alteration. A cycle continues long enough to become recognizable, then long enough to become damaged, then long enough that the damage itself begins feeling normal.
The cassette transfer preserves that process well. Neither file shows obvious digital clipping, and there are no long accidental dropouts breaking the continuity. The roughness belongs to the recording rather than presenting itself as a damaged rip. That matters here because so much of the piece depends on being able to hear deterioration as part of the performance rather than mistaking it for a failing transfer.
The single photographed object gives very little explanatory help, which is probably preferable. There is no need for the package to tell the listener what all this machinery represents. The audio is already specific enough. Two approximately ten-minute parts establish systems, injure them, restore them imperfectly, and keep going.
Part One learns how to continue.
Part Two discovers that continuing has consequences.
—ChatGPT

Shredded Nerve - 2018 - Milking The Predator Nest CS

Originally posted Mar 5, 2019 1:28AM

Dead Gods ‎– 021

The grotesque agricultural wording suggests extraction before the cassette even starts, and the two parts really do sound less like compositions being performed than a mechanism being made to continue producing after it has begun resisting the process. Repetition is everywhere, but it rarely provides stability. A cycle comes around again slightly misshapen, another piece rubs against it, something falls behind, and what initially seemed mechanical begins sounding exhausted.
Part 1 lasts almost ten minutes and starts surprisingly deep. Much of the opening is carried by a repeated low movement with smaller scraped and distorted sounds caught around it. It has a slow, awkward gait rather than the instantaneous attack of a lot of harsh noise. For the first couple of minutes the machine seems capable of maintaining itself. The repetition is ugly but dependable. Then the relationship between the parts begins slipping. More middle-range abrasion enters, the low cycle becomes less dominant, and individual sounds start arriving as though they are no longer quite synchronized with the process that produced them.
Around the middle, the recording grows considerably stronger. Instead of simply getting louder, it seems to become more crowded with competing motions. One repeated figure pushes forward while another drags behind it. Shorter bursts catch against longer loops. At moments there is almost a rhythm, but it is the rhythm of something operating badly: a belt slipping, a mechanism failing to complete the same movement at the same speed twice, pieces continuing because stopping is apparently not an option.
The most forceful stretch arrives around five to six minutes. By then the tentative opening has become a stubborn mechanical churn, with the low end repeatedly shoving against rougher material above it. Then the process starts losing pieces. During the last several minutes, what had been one large apparatus begins breaking into more exposed components. The recording gets thinner in places, heavier again in others, but increasingly sounds spent rather than triumphant. The final minute is almost a withdrawal. The low sound remains after much of the surrounding activity has weakened, then it too drains away until only the residual recording is left.
Part 2 begins much more aggressively. There is more upper abrasion immediately, more obvious tearing and scraping, and substantially more force than at the beginning of Part 1. It sounds as though the machine has been restarted without being repaired. During the first ninety seconds, deep repeated motion and bright electronic damage coexist at nearly equal strength, giving the opening a violent instability that the first part had taken several minutes to reach.
Then the balance keeps moving. Around a minute and a half, the upper material becomes particularly severe, almost stripping the piece down to a harsher exposed surface before heavier motion works its way back underneath. For the next few minutes the track keeps cycling between these states. What is interesting is that none of them feels like a clean section. One condition leaks into another. The low movement never completely leaves when the brighter noise takes over, and the abrasion remains embedded when the bottom returns.
At roughly five minutes, the structure suddenly weakens. The recording drops sharply in force, as though the machinery has stalled. This is not the ending. After the collapse, pieces begin working again, but the recovery feels compromised. The following minutes contain familiar ingredients from earlier in the cassette, only now they sound less secure. Low cycles reappear. Scraped electronics accumulate above them. A repeated action tries to establish itself and becomes increasingly ragged.
The last couple of minutes are some of the strangest material on the tape because the sound regains considerable strength without regaining stability. Bright abrasion pushes forward again, the deeper machinery continues underneath, and both seem to be consuming whatever remains. Then the system starts shutting down for real. The final stretch rapidly loses substance until almost nothing remains.
Across the two parts, the important movement is not simply quiet to loud or low to high. It is competence turning into failure. Part 1 sounds like a process gradually becoming unable to maintain its own timing. Part 2 begins with that failure already underway, briefly collapses, forces itself back into operation, and finally exhausts itself.
That makes the title unusually funny and unpleasant at the same time. “Milking” implies repeated extraction from something expected to keep yielding. “Predator” reverses the normal relationship between the thing doing the extracting and the thing being exploited. “Nest” makes the whole phrase even stranger, suggesting not one creature but a place where whatever is being drained might reproduce. The music never illustrates any of that literally, which is better. It simply keeps pulling.
The physical cassette is similarly withholding. There is very little on the object that tells you how to interpret what is happening. The images and reproduction feel processed rather than explanatory, leaving the absurd title and the mechanical behavior of the recording to collide on their own.
Compared with the later Shredded Nerve material, this feels especially fixated on failure itself. The loops do not merely repeat so that they can accumulate. They repeat until repetition becomes a problem.
Something keeps asking for more.
Eventually there is nothing left to give.
—ChatGPT

Mistletoe - 2019 - Azoth 2xCS

Originally posted Nov 29, 2019 8:27PM

 Dead Gods ‎– 044  324.88MB FLAC

Four sides, nearly an hour, and almost none of the miniature scale heard on Mistletoe’s earlier Winters Return. These recordings have time to remain somewhere long enough for the ear to accept a condition as permanent, then alter it so gradually that the original condition becomes difficult to remember. The later description of these pieces as “decompositions,” recorded live directly to chrome cassette, is particularly good. They do not behave like compositions being assembled from parts. They sound more like existing masses being allowed to decay, separate, contaminate one another and become something else.
The first side lasts about thirteen minutes and begins remarkably deep. A sustained low presence occupies much of the opening, accompanied by quieter harmonic activity that seems attached to it rather than independent from it. For several minutes Mistletoe lets that low foundation persist with very little urgency. What initially sounds almost fixed gradually develops rougher edges. Additional tones collect around the central vibration, slight beating appears between them, and the upper part of the recording becomes increasingly active. Around the halfway point the transformation becomes much easier to hear. The side that began heavily anchored near the bottom has started climbing. By the last several minutes the sound is substantially brighter and more abrasive, with upper harmonics multiplying until the original low foundation no longer controls the whole picture. The remarkable part is that there is no obvious moment of conversion. Nothing announces that one state has ended. You arrive somewhere else and realize the landscape behind you has disappeared.
The second side, nearly sixteen minutes, initially seems to restore what the first side lost. Again there is a powerful low component, this time held with even greater stubbornness through the opening several minutes. The recording feels broad and slow, with the kind of sustained vibration where tiny changes begin assuming disproportionate importance. Then, somewhere around six minutes, the floor changes. Much of that enormous bottom suddenly retreats and the piece becomes considerably more exposed through its middle and upper range. After so much time submerged, the effect is startling. Sounds that would have seemed modest in another context suddenly appear naked. The remaining ten minutes never completely rebuild the opening. Instead the piece inhabits this altered condition, rougher and more porous, allowing smaller oscillations and scraped harmonic material to move through spaces previously occupied by the low drone. Toward the end some weight returns, but it returns to a recording that has already been chemically changed.
Cassette two begins almost from zero. Side C is about fifteen and a half minutes, and its opening is one of the most dramatic uses of restraint anywhere in the set. Very little seems present at first. Then, during the first minute, the recording rapidly acquires substance. A faint signal becomes a large one; additional tones gather; what had seemed empty suddenly contains a whole environment. For the next several minutes this is the most broadly active of the four sides, with sustained sound continually roughening, swelling and changing shape. Around the middle, however, something gives way. The larger structure briefly weakens and seems to collapse inward. What follows is extraordinary: instead of rebuilding the same broad field, Mistletoe allows an enormous low tone to take possession of the recording. By roughly nine minutes, the side has become almost subterranean. Much of what previously occupied the middle and upper regions has been displaced by this huge fundamental vibration, and it remains there for the rest of the piece. Side C therefore performs one of the strangest transformations in the set: near-silence becomes complexity, complexity collapses, and the collapse reveals something much simpler and heavier underneath.
The final side, about thirteen minutes, feels less like another independent experiment than the set digesting everything that came before it. It begins cautiously, gathers considerable force during its first several minutes, and reaches one of its busiest states somewhere around the first third. There are rougher harmonics, sustained electronic friction and several layers occupying the recording at once. Then, around the middle, the entire balance drops downward. Much of the brighter activity disappears and a lower, calmer vibration assumes control. Unlike Side C, the transition does not lead to another dramatic rebuilding. Mistletoe stays there. The second half becomes increasingly patient, almost suspended, with the low material continuing while smaller details flicker at its edges. After almost an hour of repeatedly watching sounds emerge, accumulate and alter themselves, the refusal to make one last large gesture feels exactly right. The set ends by remaining with what is left.
That four-part movement is what separates this from simply being an unusually long drone release. Each side teaches the ear a different relationship to duration. The first slowly changes altitude. The second establishes a massive foundation and unexpectedly removes it. The third appears from almost nothing, grows complicated, then collapses into an immense low remainder. The fourth grows and finally settles. Heard continuously, those are not four versions of the same technique. They are four ways of asking what survives transformation.
The physical format matters here more than it did on Winters Return. Two cassettes force three interruptions into nearly an hour of sustained sound: flip the first tape, remove it, replace it, flip the second. Those mechanical breaks divide something that otherwise feels unusually continuous. The photographs and printed material likewise resist giving the set one simple explanatory image. It arrives as several objects and several surfaces, which is appropriate for music whose identity keeps changing depending on where in the process you encounter it.
“Azoth” was the alchemical name for mercury and, in another usage, the imagined universal remedy of Paracelsus. I would not claim that the four recordings are illustrating alchemy, but the word is unusually well chosen for what they actually do. Mercury refuses a fixed shape. These pieces behave similarly. A tone that seems to be the foundation becomes residue. Something barely audible becomes enormous. Complexity decomposes into a single vibration. What seems finished becomes raw material for the next state.
The interesting question across these four sides is never really, “What sound comes next?”
It is, “Is this still the same substance?”
—ChatGPT

Jackson-Pratt - 2018 - Concrete Tunnel CS

Originally posted July 27, 2018 1:14PM

 Dead Gods ‎– 023

“Darkvision” begins with repetition before it begins with chaos. Blunt low bursts keep returning with enough regularity that the opening almost feels mechanical, like some enormous damaged thing cycling through the same action. There are gaps around those first impacts, which makes each return unusually distinct. Then the gaps start closing.

Within the first half-minute the recording has thickened dramatically. What began as separate blows gets swallowed by a continuous low grind, and from there Jackson-Pratt spends most of the piece forcing different abrasive shapes through that foundation. The interesting thing is how little true high-frequency spray there is at first. Much of “Darkvision” lives low to the ground, all churn, rumble and overloaded movement, with harsher material appearing more as interruptions than as the main body.

That gives the track a strange sense of forward motion. The repeating shapes never turn into a beat, but they keep suggesting one. Something cycles, gets damaged, cycles again. Around the middle, individual sounds become increasingly difficult to trace back to a source. There are brief metallic impressions, distorted impacts and rough oscillations, but everything is being crushed together fast enough that recognition lasts only a second.

During the final third the sound slowly begins climbing out of that deep register. More jagged material becomes exposed, especially after four minutes, and the recording feels increasingly scraped open. It is not a sudden transformation. The tunnel just seems to get narrower. By the final minute there is less room around anything, more friction between the parts, until the program cuts out and leaves the cassette suddenly empty.

“Receiving Vault” opens differently. There is more activity immediately across the whole recording, with low thudding movement underneath a rougher, more complicated surface. For the first minute and a half it keeps switching emphasis without settling: heavy vibration, harsher scrape, another low surge, something brighter poking through.

Then around 1:40 the track changes radically.

For roughly the next forty seconds, much of the huge bottom falls away and the recording becomes dramatically brighter and thinner. All the ugly material that had been partially cushioned by bass is suddenly exposed. Scraping, buzzing and sharper electronic movement dominate, with enough space around them that the sound almost seems smaller even while becoming more abrasive. It is the clearest structural break anywhere on the cassette.

Around 2:20 the weight comes crashing back.

That return makes the middle of “Receiving Vault” feel enormous. The sharper material does not disappear completely, but it is now riding on top of a much deeper mechanical shove. From there the piece repeatedly changes its center of gravity: sometimes buried and blunt, sometimes more ragged and exposed, with neither condition lasting quite long enough to become dependable.

The last minute does something particularly effective. Brighter material starts climbing back into the recording again, producing another stretch of scrape and electrical agitation, but this time the low sound never fully disappears. Both states coexist for a while before the track finally loses strength. The ending feels less like a stop than a system powering down with several parts still fighting to remain audible.

The title Concrete Tunnel suits this cassette because the music continually plays with confinement. These are not wide-open blasts where every frequency simply sprays outward. Sounds hit boundaries. Repetition rebounds. Low material seems trapped underneath harder surfaces, then finds another way through. “Darkvision” spends almost six minutes moving through one increasingly constricted passage; “Receiving Vault” keeps opening and sealing different chambers.

The photographs and physical presentation make that sense of containment stronger without spelling anything out. The imagery is cool, murky and difficult to read cleanly, while the cassette itself remains a blunt little physical object holding two very compressed pieces of sound. Nothing about it asks to be elegant.

A contemporary 2018 description of Jackson-Pratt called the project “short bursts of scrap metal harsh noise.” That is remarkably accurate here, except the bursts have been packed tightly enough that they start behaving like architecture.

You can hear individual impacts.

Then the walls arrive.
—ChatGPT

Skin Graft - 2019 - Solstice CS

Originally posted May 13, 2019 3:11PM

Dead Gods ‎– 034

The first side begins so far below its eventual size that the opening minute almost functions as a distant warning. A low vibration is already there, accompanied by thinner electronic abrasion, but the recording feels held back. Nothing suddenly announces the beginning. Instead the sound spends the next several minutes steadily approaching. By two minutes it has gained considerable force; by four, what had seemed remote has become unavoidable; by six, the cassette is operating at an entirely different physical scale from where it started.
What makes that rise effective is how little it resembles a conventional crescendo. There is no melody climbing toward a peak and no obvious series of dramatic steps. The same damaged machinery simply keeps gaining authority. Low churning motion remains underneath while coarse electrical material rubs against it, occasionally producing sharper squeals or brief flashes of something almost metallic. Individual sounds are difficult to isolate because they seem welded together, yet the proportions are constantly changing. The first few minutes feel deep and muffled. Later, more of the middle of the recording opens up and the whole thing becomes rougher, broader and increasingly exposed.
Around seven minutes the ascent finally seems complete. From there the side does not need another trick. Skin Graft holds the accumulated force in place and lets it grind. The last two minutes are the fullest section of the recording, with the underlying rumble and harsher material operating together rather than one hiding behind the other. Only near the very end does the upper edge sharpen noticeably, almost as though the piece has burned away enough of its heavier material to reveal something hotter underneath. The interesting part is remembering how little was present ten minutes earlier. Side A does not travel by changing subjects. It changes scale.
Side B starts by taking nearly all of that accumulated scale away.
For almost four minutes the recording stays remarkably restrained. A deep continuous sound sits underneath sparse abrasion, and the level barely moves. After Side A, it feels almost unnaturally calm, not peaceful exactly, but contained. The piece seems willing to remain there indefinitely. That patience makes what happens next far more effective.
At roughly the four-minute point, the entire recording steps forward. The increase is abrupt enough to feel less like gradual development than somebody opening a valve. Suddenly there is far more activity in the middle of the sound, the low foundation becomes surrounded by a dense mechanical churn, and what had been distant becomes immediate. The contrast is enormous because Skin Graft has spent nearly half the side refusing to prepare you for it.
From there the piece stays lit. Buzzing, grinding and repeated surges continually reshape the surface, but the dramatic event has already happened. The threshold has been crossed. There is no return to the subdued opening. Instead the remaining six minutes work through different versions of this louder state, sometimes letting the deep vibration dominate, sometimes allowing harsher material to scrape its way forward. Late in the side the upper portion becomes increasingly active, giving the final minutes a more agitated quality without requiring another major structural break.
The word “solstice” makes an interesting title for that design without needing to turn the tape into a cosmic metaphor. A solstice is a point where movement in one direction reaches an extreme and turns. These two sides repeatedly make the listener notice such points. Side A is almost all approach, moving steadily toward maximum force. Side B establishes a long plateau and then abruptly leaves it behind. The important moments are not individual noises so much as the instant when the relationship between everything changes.
The artwork stays restrained enough to let that idea remain implicit. Several black-and-white photographic images, sparse lettering and the cassette itself provide fragments rather than an explanation. Nothing on the package tells the listener what the word is supposed to mean. It simply names the object and leaves the audio to produce its own turning points.
Skin Graft is Wyatt Howland, whose recordings have long combined harsh electronics, feedback, industrial clatter and enormous low-end movement. What is especially good here is the control underneath all that ugliness. Nearly twenty minutes are built around only a few large decisions, and Howland trusts them enough not to clutter the tape with unnecessary ones.
Side A spends ten minutes arriving.
Side B waits four minutes before opening the door.
Neither bothers to close it.
—ChatGPT

Hostage Pageant - 2019 - Shielding CS

Originally posted on May 13, 2019 3:04PM

Dead Gods ‎– 035

For two sides that last almost exactly the same amount of time, these recordings behave very differently. Side A is the more immediately imposing half: close to ten minutes of heavy electronic movement that rarely gives the listener much distance from it. Side B is quieter, less uniformly forceful and much more willing to let pieces of its structure collapse, disappear or reassemble somewhere else. Together they make “Shielding” feel less like two matched noise pieces than two different ways of obstructing access to whatever is underneath.
Side A begins low and blunt. During the opening seconds an enormous bass-heavy signal occupies most of the recording, with rougher material working around its edges. It does not sound like an introduction waiting for the real piece to begin. The machine is already running. Over the first couple of minutes that initial bottom-heavy character starts acquiring more detail: buzzing layers, scraping movements and distorted shapes appear through the center of the sound, sometimes becoming distinct for a few seconds before another element pushes over them. Hostage Pageant keeps the overall level remarkably steady, so the changes happen less through dramatic volume shifts than through one thing continually blocking another.
That becomes the side’s particular trick. A sound starts to reveal itself and another one moves across it. A repeating mechanical figure becomes noticeable, then a heavier surge masks part of the repetition. Something rough and almost rhythmic pushes through for several cycles before the surrounding electronics swallow its outline. Rather than creating a clean sequence of sections, Shane Church seems to continually replace the visible surface while leaving the overall force intact. The piece feels busy without becoming frantic.
Around the middle, the low end becomes especially stubborn. For several minutes the recording sits inside a thick band of rumbling and grinding motion, and the smaller events have to fight their way out of it. There are brief moments where some of the weight disappears and a sharper electronic shape becomes suddenly obvious, but these openings rarely last. The shield closes again.
The last two minutes change that balance more decisively. The deepest part of the sound begins losing ground, and the recording becomes increasingly centered on a rougher middle register. What had spent most of the side feeling massive begins to seem thinner and more exposed. By the final thirty seconds, the transformation is striking: there is much less of the subterranean body that dominated the beginning, leaving a comparatively wiry, abrasive remainder. Side A does not end where it started. It has gradually shed its armor.
Side B enters at a noticeably lower level. That difference matters immediately after flipping the cassette. Instead of another huge entrance, the opening feels as though the same machinery has been moved behind a wall. Deep sound is still present, but there is more room around individual motions, which makes the odd details easier to notice. The first few minutes repeatedly alternate between heavy low vibration and scratchier passages where the recording suddenly seems much smaller. Hostage Pageant is constantly changing apparent distance.
Then, around three and a half minutes, the piece seems to stumble. The signal briefly loses a substantial amount of force, almost as though something has been disconnected or pulled backward. It is one of the clearest events on the cassette precisely because so much of the surrounding material is continuous. The sound recovers quickly, but once that interruption has happened the remainder of Side B feels less dependable. Similar changes keep occurring: a thick section abruptly narrows, another low surge arrives, a rough midrange pattern takes over, then the bass reasserts itself.
The second half becomes increasingly restless without ever turning into obvious cut-up noise. The transitions are rough enough that the listener can feel them happening, yet they rarely behave like clean edits. It is more like watching electrical current repeatedly find another route through damaged equipment. Around eight minutes the recording grows sharper again, but instead of following Side A toward an exposed ending, Side B eventually sinks downward. The final half-minute is dominated by deep low sound, almost the reverse of Side A’s finish. One side ends after gradually abandoning its bottom. The other ends by returning to it.
That makes the title unusually useful without needing to force a story onto it. Throughout these twenty minutes, sounds repeatedly shield other sounds. The loudest layer becomes a cover for quieter activity underneath it. Remove that cover and suddenly an entirely different piece seems to have been present all along. Then something else moves in front. The interest is not simply that Hostage Pageant changes textures quickly. It is that the hierarchy keeps changing: foreground becomes obstruction, obstruction becomes subject, and whatever seemed hidden eventually becomes the thing doing the hiding.
The physical package reinforces that refusal to offer one clear surface. Images, reproduction and cassette documentation arrive as layers rather than a single explanatory picture. That suits Hostage Pageant especially well. Church’s harsh noise has always been unusually mobile, built from sounds colliding and being redirected rather than from maintaining one immovable wall. Here that mobility is compressed into two nearly symmetrical ten-minute lengths.
Same amount of tape.
Different protection.
—ChatGPT

Shredded Nerve - 2019 - Thinning Veil CS

Originally posted on Nov 21, 2019 11:24PM

Dead Gods ‎– 037  56.32MB FLAC

Thinning Veil lasts only about eight minutes, but its two sides seem to move in opposite directions. Side A begins at a distance, gathers itself into something substantial, then spends its final stretch gradually disappearing. Side B starts restrained and comparatively patient, waits more than half its length, and then suddenly becomes the louder and more violent half of the cassette. Put together, they feel almost hinged at the center: one closing down while the other eventually tears open.
Side A runs about 3:56. Its first seconds are surprisingly modest, with a rough repeating shape sitting inside plenty of open space. During the first minute the recording steadily acquires mass. More sounds begin clinging to the central motion and what started almost skeletal becomes increasingly tangled. By forty or fifty seconds the piece has reached a much more forceful state, but Shredded Nerve does not simply leave it there. The components keep rubbing against one another, sometimes producing a dull mechanical churn, sometimes a more brittle scrape, with bits of repetition continually surfacing just long enough to suggest a pattern.
The middle is the fullest part. Several layers seem to be moving at different speeds, and the attraction comes from trying to follow one before another obscures it. There are moments where a repeating figure almost behaves like rhythm, but it never becomes orderly enough to provide a dependable beat. Things drag, catch and slip. The sound feels constructed from loops that have been allowed to deteriorate through contact with one another.
Then, a little after two minutes, Side A begins changing character. The solid body accumulated earlier starts thinning out while sharper, rougher remnants become increasingly exposed. By the final minute the piece is clearly losing strength. Sounds that had been buried inside the larger construction now hang almost by themselves. The decline continues in stages rather than through one conventional fade, until the last seconds are barely holding anything together at all.
Side B lasts about 4:05 and initially refuses to answer that ending with another big entrance. It begins quieter and more exposed, with a scratchier repeating surface and considerably less weight underneath. For almost two minutes the piece remains relatively contained. There is motion everywhere, but it feels withheld, as though the cassette is idling rather than announcing itself. Little rough cycles repeat, change slightly and repeat again. Shredded Nerve lets that condition persist long enough that it starts feeling permanent.
It isn’t.
Around the halfway point, the recording begins swelling. The change is initially subtle, but by roughly 2:20 the whole side has started accelerating into a much more aggressive state. New material appears underneath and around the repeating figures, the recording gets physically larger, and the previously exposed loops are suddenly being crowded from every direction. Instead of Side A’s gradual erosion, Side B keeps adding force.
The final ninety seconds are the cassette at its most intense. What had spent the opening half scratching quietly at the surface has become a hard, continuous collision of repeating fragments and electronic abrasion. The increase is especially effective because the track made you wait for it. Nothing in the opening promises this much sound. By around three minutes, the restraint is gone.
Even then, there is still organization inside the attack. The noise keeps circling around recognizable recurring shapes rather than dissolving into an anonymous blast. Something returns, gets buried, pushes back through, then returns damaged again. That repeated survival of small sounds inside a larger destructive process feels particularly characteristic of Shredded Nerve. Lakes has long worked with loops, field recordings, ordinary objects and electronics, and here those materials seem less like ingredients than things being subjected to wear.
Then Side B collapses quickly at the end. After spending its final section getting increasingly large, it suddenly has nowhere else to go.
The title becomes unusually physical across the two sides. “Thinning veil” can suggest something mystical, but the cassette does not require that interpretation. You can simply hear material being concealed and exposed. Side A gradually removes what had been covering its smaller sounds. Side B begins with those smaller sounds exposed and eventually buries them beneath something much larger. What lies behind the veil keeps changing depending on which direction you approach it from.
The packaging suits that ambiguity. Across the folded artwork and cassette photographs, images are cropped, obscured and reproduced rather than presented as one clean explanatory picture. You keep getting partial information. Nothing quite offers itself whole. That is also how the audio behaves: loops appear without revealing their sources, recognizable motions repeat without explaining what made them, and sounds continually pass between foreground and concealment.
Compared with the earlier Shredded Nerve material in this Dead Gods group, this feels remarkably concise. There is no need for twenty minutes of accumulation. Each side gets one strong trajectory and follows it.
Side A gathers, then evaporates.
Side B waits, then breaks through.
For a tape called Thinning Veil, the most interesting thing may be that neither side ever shows you what was supposedly hidden behind it.
—ChatGPT