The physical cassette already announces the basic vocabulary before anything is played: contamination, bodily matter, sickness, cheap reproduction and excessive information. The murky green-blue presentation, degraded imagery, tiny printed details and utilitarian cassette shell make it feel less like a polished album package than an infected object that happened to arrive in a plastic case. Dead Gods issued it as GODS18, and inside that small package Oozing Meat cram approximately nineteen minutes of material into 766 tracks. That number sounds absurd until the tape starts. Then it begins to feel completely logical.
Side A runs a little over nine and a half minutes and immediately establishes the method. Acoustic drums, harsh electronics, distorted vocals and bursts of feedback are chopped into pieces so short that the individual “tracks” frequently exist only as impacts. A blast begins, collapses, something screams through an effect, a drum pattern briefly finds its footing, and another mass of noise wipes it away. At other moments several of those elements simply pile on top of one another. The recording is rough and overloaded, but not featureless. There are substantial changes in frequency and density throughout the side, including passages where the low body suddenly drops away and thin electrical noise or near-silence creates a tiny opening before everything fills back in. Those interruptions are important because the cassette would be much less violent if it were merely loud all the time. The empty spaces turn the next impact into another beginning. There are also fleeting moments when the drums settle into something resembling an actual groove, but Oozing Meat seem almost allergic to letting one remain intact. Just as the body starts understanding a rhythm, it is cut apart.
Side B is almost exactly the same length but has a noticeably different weight. It spends more time in the low and middle frequencies, giving sections of it a thicker, uglier physical shove compared with the brighter abrasion of much of Side A. The constant mutation continues: short percussion explosions, blown-out voices, feedback, electronic squeal, tape-like interruptions and strange fragments that briefly sound organized before being swallowed. Some passages are almost comically brief. Calling them songs seems wrong, but calling the whole thing one continuous noise piece also misses what is happening. It is hundreds of microscopic decisions presented at a speed where structure becomes texture. Oozing Meat’s particular version of noisecore lives in that contradiction. Jason Hodges and Eric Tomillon use drums, vocals and electronics, but instead of stretching those materials into conventional compositions they compress them until a whole sequence can occur in the time another band might spend counting in.
That makes the ridiculous track count more than a joke printed on an insert. You really can hear the tape continually restarting itself. It draws from the vocabulary of early noisecore and grind, but harsh noise is just as important: long enough passages of feedback and damaged electronics appear that the listener can briefly sink into a sound before another barrage begins. Samples occasionally enter like foreign matter. Voices are often processed until language is less important than the wet, strangled or abrasive shape they make. The drums give the chaos a human physical center, especially because they do not sound cleaned up or separated from the room. Everything leaks into everything else. The cassette recording adds another layer of grit, so distortion is present not only as an effect but as part of the medium itself.
The name Oozing Meat is almost embarrassingly accurate for the sound. This music does not behave like a machine executing perfect digital edits even though the track count suggests microscopic precision. It lurches, sprays, clots, stops, starts and occasionally finds a pulse. That collision between obsessive counting and bodily mess is one of the cassette’s funniest qualities. There is something inherently absurd about declaring that this short tape contains 766 tracks, then making music chaotic enough that nobody could reasonably sit there and verify them without losing their mind.
Oozing Meat were the Richmond, Virginia duo of Eric Tomillon on vocals and electronics and Jason Hodges on drums, vocals and electronics, coming out of the same broader world as Fake Object, Suppression, Brown Piss and Chaotic Noise Productions. Their work repeatedly combined 1990s-style noisecore with harsh noise, horror samples, loops and industrial debris. On this cassette those ingredients are packed particularly tightly. It does not feel like harsh noise with drums added or grindcore obscured by electronics. The distinction keeps collapsing. Drumming becomes noise, feedback becomes punctuation, vocals become another frequency, and hundreds of “songs” become a single approximately nineteen-minute object.
The original Private Release post from January 2018 consisted almost entirely of the cassette, the Dead Gods catalog number and a download. Returning to the physical copy and making a fresh rip changes that considerably. Both sides can now be heard as complete cassette sides rather than merely represented by a link. The object, the strange arithmetic of 766 tracks and the actual degraded sound all finally occupy the same post. It remains completely unreasonable music, which is precisely what makes documenting it in detail worthwhile.
—ChatGPT
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