Thinning Veil lasts only about eight minutes, but its two sides seem to move in opposite directions. Side A begins at a distance, gathers itself into something substantial, then spends its final stretch gradually disappearing. Side B starts restrained and comparatively patient, waits more than half its length, and then suddenly becomes the louder and more violent half of the cassette. Put together, they feel almost hinged at the center: one closing down while the other eventually tears open.
Side A runs about 3:56. Its first seconds are surprisingly modest, with a rough repeating shape sitting inside plenty of open space. During the first minute the recording steadily acquires mass. More sounds begin clinging to the central motion and what started almost skeletal becomes increasingly tangled. By forty or fifty seconds the piece has reached a much more forceful state, but Shredded Nerve does not simply leave it there. The components keep rubbing against one another, sometimes producing a dull mechanical churn, sometimes a more brittle scrape, with bits of repetition continually surfacing just long enough to suggest a pattern.
The middle is the fullest part. Several layers seem to be moving at different speeds, and the attraction comes from trying to follow one before another obscures it. There are moments where a repeating figure almost behaves like rhythm, but it never becomes orderly enough to provide a dependable beat. Things drag, catch and slip. The sound feels constructed from loops that have been allowed to deteriorate through contact with one another.
Then, a little after two minutes, Side A begins changing character. The solid body accumulated earlier starts thinning out while sharper, rougher remnants become increasingly exposed. By the final minute the piece is clearly losing strength. Sounds that had been buried inside the larger construction now hang almost by themselves. The decline continues in stages rather than through one conventional fade, until the last seconds are barely holding anything together at all.
Side B lasts about 4:05 and initially refuses to answer that ending with another big entrance. It begins quieter and more exposed, with a scratchier repeating surface and considerably less weight underneath. For almost two minutes the piece remains relatively contained. There is motion everywhere, but it feels withheld, as though the cassette is idling rather than announcing itself. Little rough cycles repeat, change slightly and repeat again. Shredded Nerve lets that condition persist long enough that it starts feeling permanent.
It isn’t.
Around the halfway point, the recording begins swelling. The change is initially subtle, but by roughly 2:20 the whole side has started accelerating into a much more aggressive state. New material appears underneath and around the repeating figures, the recording gets physically larger, and the previously exposed loops are suddenly being crowded from every direction. Instead of Side A’s gradual erosion, Side B keeps adding force.
The final ninety seconds are the cassette at its most intense. What had spent the opening half scratching quietly at the surface has become a hard, continuous collision of repeating fragments and electronic abrasion. The increase is especially effective because the track made you wait for it. Nothing in the opening promises this much sound. By around three minutes, the restraint is gone.
Even then, there is still organization inside the attack. The noise keeps circling around recognizable recurring shapes rather than dissolving into an anonymous blast. Something returns, gets buried, pushes back through, then returns damaged again. That repeated survival of small sounds inside a larger destructive process feels particularly characteristic of Shredded Nerve. Lakes has long worked with loops, field recordings, ordinary objects and electronics, and here those materials seem less like ingredients than things being subjected to wear.
Then Side B collapses quickly at the end. After spending its final section getting increasingly large, it suddenly has nowhere else to go.
The title becomes unusually physical across the two sides. “Thinning veil” can suggest something mystical, but the cassette does not require that interpretation. You can simply hear material being concealed and exposed. Side A gradually removes what had been covering its smaller sounds. Side B begins with those smaller sounds exposed and eventually buries them beneath something much larger. What lies behind the veil keeps changing depending on which direction you approach it from.
The packaging suits that ambiguity. Across the folded artwork and cassette photographs, images are cropped, obscured and reproduced rather than presented as one clean explanatory picture. You keep getting partial information. Nothing quite offers itself whole. That is also how the audio behaves: loops appear without revealing their sources, recognizable motions repeat without explaining what made them, and sounds continually pass between foreground and concealment.
Compared with the earlier Shredded Nerve material in this Dead Gods group, this feels remarkably concise. There is no need for twenty minutes of accumulation. Each side gets one strong trajectory and follows it.
Side A gathers, then evaporates.
Side B waits, then breaks through.
For a tape called Thinning Veil, the most interesting thing may be that neither side ever shows you what was supposedly hidden behind it.
—ChatGPT
No comments:
Post a Comment
Hi.