Abomination begins with a title that could belong to nearly any harsh-noise release and then earns it through a more peculiar route than expected. This 2001 CDr pairs Facialmess with Sickness, two projects already committed to overloaded sound, damaged media and hostile editing, but the disc is not simply a clean division between Japanese cut-up violence and American harsh-noise pressure. Its history includes an apparent manufacturing error: copies were issued with incorrect material occupying the portion credited to Sickness. The mistake turns the release into a malformed object, one whose identity is divided between what the packaging claims, what the artists intended and what the listener actually receives.
Facialmess takes the opening position with “The Jester at the Dawn of Time,” a twenty-four-minute construction that refuses the easy satisfactions of either continuous wall noise or orderly collage. Masahiro Takahashi’s work as Facialmess is built from abrupt edits, clashing sources and shifts in density that make the track feel actively handled. Sounds do not merely accumulate. They are cut off, displaced and forced against one another. A burst may suggest machinery, damaged electronics, environmental recording or mutilated broadcast audio, but identification rarely remains possible for long. Just as the ear begins to establish a source, the track tears the frame away.
That instability gives Facialmess a different physical character from noise based primarily on sustained volume. The violence lies in the editing. Silence, interruption and sudden changes in scale become as important as distortion. A dense section can collapse into a thin electrical whine; a low mechanical churn can be punctured by a sharp fragment entering at an apparently incorrect angle. The listener is denied the chance to become comfortably numb. Even when the volume remains high, the internal surface keeps changing.
“The Jester at the Dawn of Time” is an unusually evocative title for this process. A jester belongs near power but stands outside its official order, permitted to distort language and mock authority. Placing that figure at the dawn of time makes disorder seem primordial, present before systems became stable enough to describe themselves. Facialmess constructs the piece accordingly. It sounds less like a world being destroyed than a world failing to assemble properly in the first place. Events arrive without dependable sequence. Cause and effect are disconnected. Every apparent structure contains the mechanism of its own interruption.
The track’s length allows these edits to accumulate into something larger than a rapid demonstration of technique. Twenty-four minutes is enough time for the listener to develop expectations, and Facialmess repeatedly uses those expectations as material. A passage may continue just long enough to resemble a settled environment before being severed. Another may appear too briefly to register as more than an impact. The composition moves between immersion and refusal, allowing entry into a texture and then ejecting the listener before that texture becomes a destination.
Sickness approaches harsh noise through a similarly physical but recognizably different history. Chris Goudreau’s project emerged from the American noise underground with an emphasis on distortion, feedback, crude electronics and live intensity. Where Facialmess often emphasizes cinematic cutting and fractured source material, Sickness can feel more concerned with direct pressure: the sound of amplification pushed into instability, noise behaving as an event happening in the room rather than an abstract composition placed at a distance.
That anticipated contrast is part of what makes Abomination compelling as a split. Facialmess fractures time; Sickness appears prepared to fill the resulting space with brute force. One side cuts the body of sound apart while the other drives current through whatever remains. Even before considering the CDr’s manufacturing problem, the pairing is sensible because the artists share extremity without sharing identical methods.
The error complicates that relationship. According to information attached to the release, the label pressed incorrect material in place of the intended Sickness tracks. What should have been a presentation of two artists therefore became a document containing a false second half, or at least a second half detached from its proper attribution. For collectors, this is a defect. For the physical identity of Abomination, however, the defect has become inseparable from the object. The mistake is not outside the release anymore. It is what surviving copies contain.
Noise has always maintained a productive relationship with failure. Broken equipment, overloaded inputs, damaged tapes, cheap duplication and accidental feedback can all become compositional tools. Yet the error on Abomination occurs at another level. It is not necessarily a sound chosen or manipulated by either artist. It is a breakdown in the chain between artist, label, duplication and listener. The release itself becomes unreliable.
That unreliability suits the music with almost suspicious precision. Facialmess spends twenty-four minutes destroying continuity, then the disc’s production history destroys the expected continuity between credit and sound. The packaging tells the listener that Sickness is present, but the audio may contradict it. Authorship becomes unstable in the same way that Facialmess makes sonic identity unstable. A mistake made outside the composition begins to behave like a final involuntary edit.
This should not be romanticized into the claim that incorrect audio is somehow better than the missing intended material. The proper Sickness contribution would remain the more accurate version of the collaboration, and its absence represents a real loss. The point is that the released CDr developed a separate existence. Abomination is both the split that was planned and the faulty object that actually circulated. Those two versions occupy the same packaging.
The presentation reinforces the crude economy of early underground CDr culture. This is not an artifact built to disguise its small-scale production behind professional polish. The title, imagery and label identity announce abrasion without elegance. Audio Intruder Pain for Community Records sounds less like a company than a threat delivered through malfunctioning translation. The CDr format was ideal for such releases because it allowed extreme material to circulate quickly and cheaply, but it also carried instability: hand assembly, limited duplication, uncertain longevity and the possibility of mistakes becoming permanent.
In that setting, Abomination does not feel incomplete so much as contaminated. Its physical form carries evidence of the circumstances that produced it. A factory-pressed album usually tries to make every copy identical and authoritative. A small-run CDr can feel more provisional, as though the release remains one accident away from becoming something else. Here that accident apparently occurred.
Facialmess’s side remains the firm center of the disc. “The Jester at the Dawn of Time” is long enough to function as a complete release on its own, and its editing rewards close attention beneath the immediate abrasion. The track does not progress through conventional development, but it is not random. Recurring contrasts between mass and interruption create a rough architecture. Thick passages establish weight; sudden cuts expose the edge of the recording; smaller sounds move through the gaps like objects briefly illuminated inside a wrecked building.
The result belongs to a period when cut-up noise could still feel inseparable from physical media. Editing did not suggest the frictionless rearrangement of files on a screen. It sounded like tape, copied sources, hardware and manual decisions. Whether or not every sound was literally produced through analog methods matters less than the sensation of material being handled. Facialmess makes audio feel tangible enough to slice.
Abomination therefore survives as more than a minor item connecting two established noise discographies. It documents the attraction of the split format, where similarity and difference can be compressed onto one cheap object. It contains a substantial Facialmess piece whose fractured movement remains vivid. It points toward a Sickness contribution that the released disc may not actually provide. Most unusually, it preserves a production mistake that mirrors the instability of the music without resolving it.
Nothing about the release is dependable. Titles promise identities that sound cannot securely confirm. The split may not contain the split it claims to be. The CDr itself belongs to a format vulnerable to decay, duplication and disappearance. Yet these failures do not make Abomination empty. They give it a crooked historical shape. It is an artifact of harsh noise not only because harsh noise is recorded upon it, but because interference has entered every level of its existence: composition, attribution, manufacture and memory.
Facialmess begins by cutting sound into unstable pieces. Somewhere between the intended master and the finished disc, the release suffers another cut that nobody appears to have requested. Abomination arrives damaged before the listener can damage it further.
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