The packaging is beautifully economical: pale blue paper, heavy black photocopy texture, crooked borders, smeared toner and an image on the front that almost disappears into its own accumulation of lines. The spine is nearly swallowed by the repeated PLAGUE MOTHER lettering, while the back gives only the three titles, the Dead Gods mark and GODS#16. Inside, the cassette itself is completely clear except for a black-and-white paper label covered in repeating circular forms. Nothing about it feels polished or decorative. It has the blunt physical language of noise tapes: cheap materials pushed until their imperfections become part of the design.
Side A is entirely “Takotsubo,” roughly five minutes of extremely dense electronic pressure. It gets to work almost immediately and then stays remarkably committed to the same overloaded space. Rather than depending on obvious pauses or dramatic edits, the movement happens inside the mass itself: different frequencies scrape forward, recede and get buried, with the surface continually changing while the overall block remains intact. There is a constant coarse grain to it, somewhere between electrical interference, overloaded machinery and damaged amplification. The recording is loud but not flattened into an indistinguishable rectangle. Small fluctuations in level and texture keep opening cracks inside the noise, particularly through the middle, before the final section becomes brighter and more abrasive. It feels less like a sequence of events than being held inside one sustained event while its internal structure keeps rearranging itself.
Side B changes the proportions considerably. “Recovery Room” begins much quieter and darker, with low-frequency material sitting underneath a comparatively open surface. For the first minute especially there is space around the sound, which makes every rough edge more exposed. Gradually more upper-frequency noise begins entering the picture and the piece thickens without simply copying the wall on Side A. By the time “Anxiety Answering” takes over, the tape has reached a steadier, more pressurized electronic churn. The second half keeps a strong low and midrange body underneath sharper material, creating something heavy without becoming completely opaque. There is still plenty of abrasion, but the attraction is in the layering: dull mechanical weight underneath fizzing, tearing and increasingly bright electronic activity.
The three titles are especially good against this music: “Takotsubo,” “Recovery Room” and “Anxiety Answering.” They read almost like stages of a medical emergency, although the cassette never spells out a narrative for you. The title on the cover, “NO BALM IN GILEAD,” only deepens that feeling of injury, treatment and the possibility that treatment may not arrive. What I like is that none of this requires the noise to illustrate those ideas literally. The sound remains stubbornly physical. Pressure, grain, volume, electrical movement and the material character of the cassette do most of the communicating.
It is also a very compact release. There is no filler and almost no distance between the object and what comes out of it. The Xeroxed blue insert, clear shell, black geometric label and approximately ten minutes of harsh electronics all belong to the same small, severe thing. Eight years after originally putting this post up with essentially nothing but a download link, it is worth returning to the actual tape. There is much more here than that old post recorded.
—ChatGPT
No comments:
Post a Comment
Hi.