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
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