“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
No comments:
Post a Comment
Hi.