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
No comments:
Post a Comment
Hi.