Mangled Clit - 2022 - Erotakill 2xCD

 

Hospital Productions – HOS-777  676.65MB FLAC Erotakill does not begin by inviting the listener into a scene. It begins by sealing the exits. The first disc immediately establishes the Mangled Clit method as pressure rather than composition in any conventional sense: electronics pushed into unstable density, voices degraded until language becomes threat, and repetition used not to create groove but to remove orientation. The sound feels less performed than activated. Once it begins, the room seems to shrink around it. Hospital Productions’ 2022 two-CD edition gathers the group’s two legendary cassette releases, SS66/72 and Purveyors of Cruelty, into one deliberately excessive object. The set does not resemble a retrospective designed to make difficult work approachable. Nothing has been reorganized into a polite historical survey, and the material has not been softened into tasteful “industrial ambience.” The original recordings are restored clearly enough for their internal violence to become more distinct, but the restoration does not disinfect them. Tape damage, unstable levels, overloaded signals and decomposed voices remain part of the architecture. That distinction matters. Noise reissues can become strangely respectable when transferred to compact disc. A scarce cassette once surrounded by rumor, duplication loss and private circulation may suddenly arrive with clean indexing, professional mastering and deluxe packaging. Erotakill uses those advantages without allowing them to neutralize the recordings. The digital format makes every layer easier to locate, but locating a layer only reveals another damaged surface behind it. Mangled Clit emerged from New York’s underground noise culture with a reputation shaped as much by absence as output. The discography was small, the tapes difficult to obtain and the project’s imagery designed to trigger rejection before listening even began. Hospital’s description of the group as controversial and infamous is not ordinary label inflation. The name alone functioned as a barrier, while the recordings pushed past provocation into a form of pressure electronics too ugly, personal and structurally strange to become simple shock merchandise. SS66/72 carries the more primitive aura of the two programs. Its sounds appear scraped directly from machinery before anyone decided whether they should become music. Low electronic currents swell beneath bursts of sharper frequency, while voices enter already partially destroyed. There is rarely a stable foreground. A scream, spoken fragment or repeated phrase may seem momentarily central, then disappear into distortion as another frequency takes control. The voices are crucial because they prevent the material from becoming anonymous harsh noise. They are not clear enough to function as conventional lyrics, yet too emotionally charged to become texture alone. Words seem to rot during transmission. Tone, breath and hostility survive after syntax begins falling apart. The listener is left with the sensation of overhearing something private through damaged wiring, unable to determine whether the transmission is confession, threat or command. This uncertainty gives Mangled Clit a different character from noise built entirely around volume. Loudness is present, but the recordings are more interested in contamination. Sound enters other sound and changes it. A low drone becomes polluted by a voice. Feedback cuts through a sustained electronic mass, then remains embedded inside it. Repetition does not clarify the structure. It causes each element to lose its original identity. The cassette source remains audible in the pacing. These pieces were not designed as isolated tracks competing for immediate attention. They accumulate through duration, with one passage staining whatever follows. Tape encourages this kind of listening because it resists easy navigation. Even after the material has been divided across CD tracks, the original sense of being trapped within a continuous side remains. Purveyors of Cruelty is more focused without becoming cleaner. The title identifies cruelty not as an event but as a product being distributed. The electronics feel more deliberate, with long zones of pressure interrupted by vocal incursions and sudden changes in density. If SS66/72 sounds discovered in the act of malfunctioning, Purveyors sounds built to malfunction in specific ways. The second program also makes better use of restraint. Some passages pull back far enough for the room around the signal to become audible. This does not create relief. It creates anticipation. A reduced hum can feel more threatening than a wall of distortion because the listener begins waiting for the next rupture. Mangled Clit understand that pressure depends upon contrast, even when the contrasts occur between different degrees of damage. The group’s New York identity survives without field recordings, street samples or obvious references to location. The city appears through compression, confrontation and the absence of pastoral space. This is not New York imagined through skyline grandeur or nightclub glamour. It is a closed interior, overheated equipment, neighbors on the other side of a wall and electricity forced through inadequate connections. The recordings belong to an era when underground noise could remain genuinely difficult to locate. A cassette might circulate through mail, trades, small lists or personal recommendation, accumulating reputation faster than reliable information. That obscurity was not automatically artistic virtue, but it altered the listener’s encounter. Music arrived without searchable biography, streaming preview or consensus. The object might be the only explanation available. Erotakill recreates some of that encounter through withholding. The packaging includes photographs and a poster, yet the release still refuses a comfortable narrative. It does not explain the project into harmlessness. The material is presented as a complete discography, but completeness does not produce understanding. Hearing everything only confirms how little the recordings care about making their intentions legible. The two-CD length intensifies this refusal. A single cassette side of extreme electronics can be experienced as a concentrated assault. Two discs create a different psychological condition. The listener begins noticing exhaustion, adaptation and changing sensitivity. Frequencies that seemed unbearable at first become environmental. Quieter sections grow louder in perception. The ears start searching for pattern because the mind wants a structure capable of containing the duration. Mangled Clit repeatedly deny that comfort. Patterns emerge, but they rarely develop toward release. A repeated vocal fragment may suggest a refrain, yet it does not return with the emotional function of a chorus. It becomes more degraded, more irritating or more distant. Rhythm appears as pulse without dance. Texture thickens without reaching climax. The music creates expectation and then leaves expectation active. This makes Erotakill less theatrical than its title and reputation might suggest. The imagery is extreme, but the sound does not behave like a staged spectacle with clearly timed shocks. Its cruelty is procedural. Electronics continue applying pressure regardless of whether the listener remains impressed. The recordings do not seem interested in reaction because reaction has already been absorbed into the mechanism. The mastering is important here. “Restored” does not mean transformed into modern loudness. The best passages retain depth inside distortion. Low frequencies possess body, midrange voices remain buried at varying distances and high feedback cuts without flattening everything around it. The transfer allows the original tape character to remain unstable while making that instability more physically precise. The booklet and miniature poster turn what once circulated as fragile cassette culture into a substantial archival package, but the deluxe form creates a productive contradiction. Something designed to feel forbidden, disposable or contaminated now arrives as an edition built to survive. Hospital Productions treats the material as history without requiring it to become respectable. That preservation also exposes how narrow the distance can be between underground legend and forgotten tape. Mangled Clit’s output was “quality over quantity” partly because there was so little of it. The lack of a sprawling catalog concentrated attention on these recordings, allowing each cassette to gather rumor. Erotakill places both in one location and tests whether the sound can survive the disappearance of scarcity. It does. The recordings remain hostile because their power was never dependent entirely upon rarity. The obscurity helped build the surrounding mythology, but the electronics themselves possess enough internal tension to withstand availability. The tapes may no longer require years of searching, yet the listening experience still refuses convenience. Erotakill is therefore both archive and endurance test. It documents a small, notorious body of work while preserving the sensation that documentation itself may be another form of exposure. Two discs, a booklet and a poster should make the project easier to grasp. Instead, they provide more surfaces through which its refusal can be examined. The set ends without explaining what has been survived. Voices have decomposed, electronics have crowded the available space and repetition has stripped familiar listening habits down to raw attention. The title promises erotic murder, but the real subject is prolonged contact with damaged signal. Nothing seduces cleanly. Nothing dies quickly. The machine remains on long after the listener has understood that it was never built to provide an exit.

Mangled Clit - 1996 - Purveyors Of Cruelty CS

Slaughter Productions ‎– 094

Purveyors of Cruelty begins with the feeling that something has already been running for hours behind a locked door. There is no theatrical entrance, no clean ignition and no attempt to establish a welcoming foreground. The tape seems to catch Mangled Clit in progress, electronics grinding against overloaded levels while degraded voices push through the mass as if they have been recorded from the far side of an argument. The sound is dense, but not static. Low currents swell, sharper frequencies scrape across them and fragments of speech repeatedly threaten to become understandable before distortion removes the words again. The cassette does not present cruelty as a dramatic event. It presents cruelty as a process that has become routine.
Issued by Marco Corbelli’s Slaughter Productions as catalog number SPT 94, the cassette belongs to the label’s extraordinary mid-1990s run of industrial noise, death electronics, private obsession and deliberately hostile physical artifacts. Slaughter Productions was not a neutral distribution system placing different artists beneath one logo. Corbelli’s own work as Atrax Morgue established a psychological climate around the imprint: isolation, death, compulsion, bodily anxiety and electronics used as instruments of confinement. Purveyors of Cruelty fits that climate without sounding like an imitation of Atrax Morgue. Mangled Clit bring a more crowded, unstable and confrontational form of pressure, one in which voice and electronics appear to contaminate each other.
The original C60 format is essential to the recording’s effect. Sixty minutes is long enough for an abrasive cassette to stop behaving like a sequence of pieces and become an environment. The listener does not simply encounter one harsh passage, recover and prepare for another. Sound from the first section remains psychologically active while later material arrives. The tape accumulates pressure because rewinding, skipping and cleanly indexing individual moments are contrary to its natural movement. Once a side begins, the mechanism encourages endurance.
That endurance is different from the experience offered by the later Erotakill two-CD collection. The 2022 set preserved the music, clarified its internal layers and placed Purveyors of Cruelty within Mangled Clit’s tiny surviving discography. The original cassette has no such historical framing. It arrives alone, without the reassurance that time has already classified it as an archival object. Its duplication quality, continuous sides and limited visual information make the music feel less explained and more immediate.
The electronics are aggressive, but they rarely settle into the smooth totality of a pure harsh-noise wall. Mangled Clit leave openings, weak points and uneven surfaces inside the sound. A low drone may dominate for several minutes before a thin frequency begins cutting across it. A voice enters too close to the microphone, overloaded until emotion remains clearer than language. Mechanical pulses emerge, suggesting rhythm, then lose enough regularity to become another form of agitation.
This instability keeps the cassette physically alert. The listener cannot relax into one consistent density because the relationship between elements keeps changing. Sometimes the voice appears trapped beneath the electronics. Elsewhere it occupies the surface, pressing the machines into the background. At certain moments the entire mix seems to collapse into one dirty midrange block, only for a bass vibration or high feedback edge to reveal that depth still exists inside it.
The voices give Purveyors of Cruelty its human threat. Without them, the material could be heard as abstract electrical pressure, hostile but impersonal. Mangled Clit allow breath, strain and speech rhythm to survive inside the distortion. The words may be obscured, yet the body delivering them remains present. A phrase repeats with the persistence of accusation. A yell breaks apart under overload. A quieter voice appears briefly, making the surrounding noise feel more invasive because something vulnerable has become audible inside it.
This use of language without stable meaning is more unsettling than a clearly stated provocation. Once a sentence can be understood, the listener can evaluate it and place it at a distance. Mangled Clit repeatedly deny that distance. The emotional posture is obvious, but the precise message remains damaged. The listener is forced to confront hostility without the comfort of knowing exactly what produced it.
The title frames the project as distribution. These are not merely acts of cruelty or observers of cruelty, but purveyors, people who supply it as a continuing product. That commercial language makes the cassette sound almost professional in its intention. Cruelty is stocked, circulated and delivered through the same underground mail networks that moved cassettes, catalogs and letters between noise artists. The title quietly implicates the object itself. Buying, trading or copying the tape becomes part of the distribution system it names.
Slaughter Productions was perfectly suited to that idea. The label’s releases often blurred the boundary between music, evidence and psychological artifact. A cassette could feel like a document received from one private fixation rather than an album entering a public marketplace. Catalog numbers created continuity, but the releases frequently resisted ordinary consumer expectations through severe imagery, limited information and sounds that offered no obvious social use.
Purveyors of Cruelty does not function as entertainment in the conventional sense, yet it is carefully shaped. Mangled Clit understand pacing. Maximum density would become monotonous if maintained without alteration, so the tape repeatedly changes the location of pressure. A quieter passage can feel more dangerous than a loud one because it allows anticipation to expand. A repeated pulse creates the possibility of rhythm, then another frequency enters and makes that rhythm feel compulsory rather than liberating.
The recording also benefits from the limitations of cassette. Tape compression rounds the most violent peaks while adding its own hiss and saturation, binding separate sound sources into one unstable body. Low frequencies can become soft-edged but heavy, while higher noise gathers a grain impossible to reproduce through perfectly clean digital recording. The medium does not merely contain the electronics. It processes them continuously.
Small fluctuations in level and tonal balance reinforce the sense that the tape is alive in an unhealthy way. The sound can lean to one side, narrow unexpectedly or seem to recede before surging back. Whether these changes originated in performance, mixing, duplication or the specific surviving copy becomes impossible to determine. That uncertainty is part of the artifact. Production and deterioration cooperate.
The cassette’s obscurity also shaped its reputation. In 1996, a release like this could circulate far more slowly than information about it. A title, project name or partial description might travel through catalogs before the actual tape reached a listener. Mangled Clit’s confrontational name intensified that distance, announcing extremity while withholding almost everything else. The music could gather an aura before anyone nearby had heard it.
That aura would mean little if the tape itself were merely generic provocation. Purveyors of Cruelty survives because its sound remains difficult to stabilize. It does not settle into the familiar language of power electronics built around one clearly dominant vocal and one continuous synthesizer assault. It feels more tangled. Electronics scrape, voices rot and repeated structures continually lose their center.
The lack of a large discography gives the cassette additional concentration. Mangled Clit did not produce a long sequence of increasingly professional albums explaining their development. Purveyors of Cruelty sits beside SS66/72 as one of the project’s central surviving statements. The small output makes every minute feel less like one stage in a career than part of a sealed body of evidence.
This does not mean scarcity automatically creates quality. Plenty of obscure noise cassettes remain obscure because they contain little beyond imitation or undeveloped impulse. Purveyors of Cruelty has structure, personality and an atmosphere distinct enough to survive the disappearance of its original rarity. The later reissue confirmed that, but the cassette had already carried the proof in its grooves of magnetic oxide.
Its strongest passages are those where sound begins to suggest organization without becoming orderly. A pulse appears beneath a voice, and for a moment the recording resembles a damaged industrial song. Then timing slips, noise thickens and the possible song is swallowed. Elsewhere a sustained electronic tone behaves almost like an organ note until distortion corrodes its edges and removes any spiritual comfort.
This continual near-recognition is the tape’s trap. The listener keeps identifying possible forms: rhythm, speech, drone, confession, machine. None remains stable long enough to become a reliable guide. Mangled Clit use recognizable materials but keep them in states of failure.
Purveyors of Cruelty ends without giving the impression that the process has truly stopped. The cassette side reaches its physical limit, and the mechanism removes the sound. That is different from a composition arriving at a conclusion. The pressure appears capable of continuing beyond the available tape, still running behind the door where the recording first found it.
As an original Slaughter Productions cassette, the release remains more than an early version of material later collected on compact disc. Its format, duration and context determine how it behaves. The tape asks to be entered from the beginning, endured through two uninterrupted sides and accepted without archival explanation.
The 2022 edition allows Mangled Clit to be examined. The 1996 cassette allows them to remain dangerous. Its hiss, saturation, damaged voices and shifting electrical weight form a closed system whose purpose is never fully stated. Cruelty is not pictured arriving with a weapon or announced by a scream. It is manufactured slowly, duplicated onto magnetic tape and supplied in quantities small enough to become rumor.

Lefthandeddecision - 2025 - 1997-2002 2xCD

 

Troniks – TRO-358  880.23MB FLAC

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.