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
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