1997–2002 opens with noise that sounds less composed than wrestled into temporary shape. The first untitled piece crackles, spits and drags itself forward through damaged electronics whose behavior seems only partly under control. Frequencies bloom too hard, collapse, then return from another angle. The recording is rough, but not vague. Every scrape, overloaded pulse and unstable current feels physically present, as though a teenage Phil Blankenship had discovered that broken equipment could produce its own vocabulary if pushed past the point of expected use.
This two-CD set documents Lefthandeddecision before The Cherry Point, before Troniks became a major American noise label and before Blankenship’s name accumulated the history now attached to it. The material spans five years, from the project’s primitive beginnings in 1997 through recordings made around 2002, gathering pieces from self-released cassettes, international compilations, scarce editions and live performances. The set does not polish those sources into a false studio album. It lets the years remain audible.
That chronology is important because Lefthandeddecision changes across the collection without ever becoming respectable. The earliest material has the desperate immediacy of someone working with whatever could be borrowed, damaged or made to malfunction. Sounds are short, abrupt and frequently unstable. Pieces appear to discover their own form while recording is already underway. There is no concern with establishing one signature texture and protecting it. Noise is used as trial, error and emotional discharge.
The ten shorter pieces opening the first disc behave like fragments ripped from a larger private practice. Several last barely two minutes, striking quickly before disappearing. One may concentrate on a scraping midrange texture, another on low electrical pressure, another on high-frequency corrosion. Their brevity prevents them from settling into environmental listening. Each one is an object thrown into the room.
The untitled track names reinforce that bluntness. No titles direct the listener toward a theme, image or emotional interpretation. The music arrives without literary framing. This anonymity can make the tracks feel like evidence from an ongoing experiment rather than completed works waiting for individual recognition. The sequence asks the listener to hear differences in density, attack and movement rather than remember a list of names.
By the eleventh piece, which stretches past twenty-seven minutes, the collection reveals another side of Lefthandeddecision. The short shocks give way to endurance. Noise expands into an unstable field where repetition, equipment hum and slow changes in pressure become the actual structure. The piece does not simply continue one loud idea for half an hour. It keeps altering the relationship between crackle, bass weight and abrasive upper frequencies until the listener’s sense of scale changes.
Long-form noise creates a different kind of attention. At first the ear searches for events. Eventually the continuous mass becomes an environment, and smaller fluctuations begin to feel enormous. A thin tone entering near the surface can change the perceived temperature of the whole piece. A brief reduction in volume feels more dramatic than another eruption. Lefthandeddecision uses duration to retrain perception rather than merely demonstrate stamina.
The sound itself belongs to an era of American underground noise when low fidelity was not an aesthetic filter selected from a software menu. It resulted from cheap tape, mismatched connections, damaged speakers, borrowed pedals and recording chains that added their own distortions. These limitations did not simply reduce clarity. They produced the music’s character. A signal clips in one device, loses body in another and reaches cassette with a layer of hiss binding the damage together.
The remastering gives these recordings new physical definition without pretending they were ever clean. John Wiese’s work allows the crust and crunch to remain layered rather than collapsing into one gray wall. Low frequencies carry more weight, brittle textures keep their edges and buried movements can be followed beneath the surface. The set sounds restored, but not sanitized.
The second disc feels more concentrated and deliberate. The textures remain corroded, yet there is a growing sense that Blankenship understands exactly how much instability to preserve. Longer pieces develop through controlled accumulation, while shorter tracks strike with sharper internal logic. Primitive experimentation begins turning into a method.
That transition foreshadows The Cherry Point, though Lefthandeddecision never sounds like an early sketch waiting to become a more important project. The later work would often push saturation toward enormous physical force, using harsh noise as a dense, punishing continuum. Lefthandeddecision is more ragged and porous. Gaps remain inside the sound. Frequencies fail unevenly. The machinery seems exposed.
Those weak points are often the most interesting parts. A burst of static can briefly open enough space for a low tone to appear behind it. A repeated scraping figure starts to resemble rhythm before losing its regularity. Feedback circles toward a stable pitch, then breaks apart just before becoming melodic. The music continually approaches recognizable forms and refuses to remain inside them.
This refusal separates the collection from noise built solely around maximum volume. 1997–2002 contains loudness, but the real subject is texture under stress. Every sound appears to be changing state. Hiss becomes rhythm, distortion becomes atmosphere and electrical failure becomes phrasing. The listener is not asked merely to withstand the recording. The listener is asked to examine what damage can organize.
The live material adds another dimension. Studio or bedroom noise can be assembled through layering, editing and repeated attempts. Live performance places the equipment in public time. A mistake cannot be quietly removed, and a developing texture must be followed wherever it goes. The longer live passages feel dangerous because they retain the possibility of collapse without allowing collapse to end the performance.
The two-CD length also reveals how quickly Blankenship was learning. Five years is a short period, but the distance between the earliest bursts and the later extended pieces is substantial. The first recordings often sound like discovery through collision. By the end, collision has become compositional material. The noise remains raw, yet the timing of density, interruption and repetition grows more confident.
The packaging’s refusal to provide detailed source notes creates a productive frustration. The listener knows that the set pulls from cassettes, rare releases and performances, but individual tracks are not neatly assigned to dates and editions. This removes part of the archival map. Instead of hearing each piece as a historical item with a fixed origin, the material becomes one long development whose exact boundaries remain hidden.
That choice suits Lefthandeddecision. The project was born before searchable discographies and instant online context could stabilize every obscure tape. Recordings circulated through mail, trades and small labels, often arriving with minimal explanation. Information moved unevenly. A project might be known first through rumor, a compilation appearance or one copied cassette. The music carried its own incomplete history.
1997–2002 recreates some of that uncertainty while making the recordings widely accessible for the first time. Over two hours of material once scattered across formats now sit inside one six-panel digipak, released jointly by Helicopter and Troniks, the label Blankenship would later establish. The object folds early experimentation back into the infrastructure that grew from it.
There is something satisfying in that circle. Troniks eventually became a major conduit for American harsh noise, but this collection returns to the period before there was a stable label identity to support the work. Lefthandeddecision sounds like the activity that made such infrastructure necessary: too much sound, too many experiments and too much restless energy to remain contained by borrowed gear and self-released tapes.
The final fifteen-minute track does not resolve the history. It stretches the project’s methods into one last field of abrasive motion, allowing sound to erode, gather and continue without offering a ceremonial ending. The collection stops because the disc reaches its limit, not because Lefthandeddecision has completed a narrative.
That is the correct ending for an archive built from unfinished pressure. 1997–2002 does not present a young artist moving neatly from immaturity to mastery. It preserves years of testing, failing, repeating and discovering what broken sound could do. The later reputation of The Cherry Point and Troniks may bring listeners to the set, but the recordings do not need those achievements to justify them.
Lefthandeddecision already contains a complete world: corroded tape, unstable voltage, borrowed equipment and teenage frustration converted into texture. The noise is primitive because the tools were primitive, but also because the project kept reaching for sound before convention could tell it what the result should become. Two decades later, the rust has not fallen away. The remaster simply makes every flake easier to hear.
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