Gate To Gate - 2005 - I Turn Black Keys

 

PACrec – PACrec113  612.34MB FLAC

I Turn Black Keys is a title with a perfect double edge. It sounds musical at first, like a hand moving toward a piano, but the phrase immediately darkens. The keys do not play black notes. They are turned black. Something has happened to the instrument, or to the lock, or to the act of access itself. Gate To Gate take that ambiguity and drag it through almost eighty minutes of blackened noise, drone, percussion, and suffocated industrial atmosphere.

Gate To Gate was the collaboration of Greh Holger, known for Hive Mind and Chondritic Sound, and Mike Connelly of Hair Police, Wolf Eyes, and Gods of Thundra. That pairing already suggests a meeting of two Michigan-adjacent underground nerve systems: Holger’s heavy electronic dread and Connelly’s feral noise-rock/industrial damage. Released in 2005 by PACrec and Troniks, I Turn Black Keys gathered two earlier cassette releases in remastered form and added a new thirty-eight-minute title piece. Vital Weekly described it as “almost eighty minutes” on the darker side of the noise spectrum, with the new piece moving from muffled tone into feedback and buried percussion while remaining “pitch black.”

That structure matters because the disc is not only an album. It is a transition document. The massive opening title track feels like a new tunnel being bored through the earlier material. It is long, airless, and stubborn. Rather than explode in clean harsh-noise fashion, it seems to sink, thicken, and clog. The sound has weight but not release. Feedback and percussion appear as shapes trapped in tar, trying to move through an environment that keeps absorbing them.

The remaining pieces, “Bane” and “House With The Clocks In Its Walls,” come from earlier cassette material, and that origin remains audible in the best way. They feel more torn open, more unstable, less monolithic than the title track. Guts of Darkness lists the CD as five tracks, with the title piece at 37:58, two “Bane” parts around ten minutes each, and two “House With The Clocks In Its Walls” parts around eleven minutes each. It also notes the cardboard sleeve and an edition of 1000 copies, which gives the release that mid-2000s noise-object quality: substantial enough to circulate, limited enough to feel like a door you had to know existed.

What separates this from simple “dark noise” is the sense of pressure management. Gate To Gate do not just pile distortion until the room fills. They work with occlusion. Sounds are hidden inside other sounds. Percussion does not always strike forward; sometimes it seems to happen behind a wall. The drones are not smooth atmospheres but contaminated weather. The black metal element is present less as riffing than as temperature: thin shriek, suffocation, hostile air, a refusal of brightness.

There is something interesting about hearing this after Barn Sour. Barn Sour lets weirdness remain bodily, comic, rural, half-domestic. Gate To Gate removes the joke and turns the space inward. The body is still present, but more as pressure, breath, impact, and panic. If Barn Sour makes the barn strange, Gate To Gate makes the cellar endless.

The title “House With The Clocks In Its Walls” also gives the record one of its strongest images. Time is not outside the structure. It is embedded in the walls, ticking where it cannot be reached. That feels right for this album’s relationship to old cassette material. The earlier recordings are not merely bonus tracks. They are clocks inside the house, still running underneath the newer title piece. The CD becomes a building where multiple moments of the project coexist: tape past, remastered present, new long-form statement, and later blog rediscovery.

As an archive entry, I Turn Black Keys fits beautifully because it belongs to a period when noise, black metal texture, drone, and cassette-culture ritual were feeding one another without needing clean genre permission. It is not a polished dark ambient record, not a straight harsh noise disc, not metal in the usual sense. It is a black room with equipment left on, and somewhere inside that room the door keeps changing location.

This is not easy listening, but it is not empty punishment either. Its value is in the density, the refusal of easy climax, the way it makes darkness feel material rather than symbolic. Gate To Gate do not point at the void. They pack the void into a small room and let it sweat through the walls.