This seven-inch contains only seven and a half minutes of sound, but it preserves an unusually complete miniature of the Houston noise underground. Richard Ramirez appears alone as Werewolf Jerusalem on one side; Sean Matzus and Vance Osborne appear as In the Land of Archers on the other. The record was released through Matzus’s Unlimited Drift Recordings, and all three musicians belonged to an overlapping local network of projects, performances, labels and personal relationships. It is therefore less a confrontation between strangers than a small object passed between neighboring rooms.
The two titles almost form a sentence. Werewolf Jerusalem offers “Never to Be Found.” In the Land of Archers answers with “He Taught Us How to Talk With Our Eyes.” One side describes disappearance, the other communication without speech. Together they suggest people attempting to recognize one another after ordinary language has failed. That is an unexpectedly intimate framework for a harsh-noise split.
Werewolf Jerusalem was Richard Ramirez’s vehicle for what he called static noise, a deliberately reduced form of harsh noise wall in which a narrow body of sound is allowed to persist without conventional development. This reduction distinguishes the project from the more crowded junk-metal attack associated with Black Leather Jesus. Instead of assembling a large collision of objects and performers, Werewolf Jerusalem concentrates on one damaged surface and studies what occurs inside its apparent stillness.
“Never to Be Found” is short enough to behave like evidence rather than environment. The wall does not have twenty or forty minutes to become meditative. It arrives already established, as though the listener has intercepted a fragment of something continuing before and after the groove. Its surface seems fixed, but close attention reveals small differences in grain, pressure and internal movement. The sound does not travel toward a climax. It remains in place and makes the listener’s perception do the moving.
This is one of the strange strengths of wall noise. When obvious progression is removed, attention begins manufacturing its own events. A rough band of static may suddenly seem to divide into upper abrasion and lower pressure. A repeated vibration appears, disappears and may never have existed outside the listener’s attempt to organize the field. The music becomes a negotiation between physical signal and nervous interpretation.
The title deepens that process. Something “never to be found” has moved beyond ordinary searching, but the sound itself is impossible to ignore. It occupies the entire available space while claiming permanent absence. The missing object has not left silence behind. It has left a barrier. The listener can press against it but cannot recover what lies beyond.
Ramirez’s interest in horror cinema is also relevant without requiring the track to illustrate a specific film. Horror frequently depends upon withheld information: a figure obscured by fog, movement behind a wall or evidence pointing toward someone who cannot be located. Werewolf Jerusalem converts that structure into sound. The wall is both the thing encountered and the surface preventing further knowledge.
The seven-inch format intensifies the concentration. A long wall recording can gradually detach the listener from ordinary time. Here the physical limit of the groove produces a more abrupt encounter. The needle enters, static occupies the room, and the side ends before habituation is complete. The brevity makes the piece feel almost aggressive in its refusal to explain itself.
Turning the record introduces a completely different set of conditions. “He Taught Us How to Talk With Our Eyes” was captured live at the Dead Audio Festival rather than constructed privately in a studio. The shift is not simply from one project to another. It is from isolation to social space, from a controlled recording environment to an event involving performers, equipment, architecture and an audience sharing the same moment.
In the Land of Archers was the Houston duo of Sean Matzus and Vance Osborne, a project associated with improvised electronics, electroacoustic sound, drone and noise. Their side preserves the instability of live interaction. Where Werewolf Jerusalem establishes a single dense surface, Matzus and Osborne allow separate elements to remain audible long enough to affect one another. Sounds enter, overlap, recede and change function according to their surroundings.
The title is unusually tender. Communication through the eyes suggests intimacy, secrecy or circumstances in which speaking would be impossible. It might describe lovers, frightened people, conspirators, performers or anyone who has learned to recognize meaning before it becomes language. The unnamed “he” introduces another absence. A teacher is acknowledged, but not identified. Knowledge survives after its source has disappeared.
Placed beside “Never to Be Found,” the title suggests that disappearance does not eliminate relationship. Someone may remain unreachable while the method he taught continues operating between others. The two tracks begin to resemble memory from opposite sides: one presents the impenetrable surface left by absence, while the other preserves a communication developed in response to it.
The live recording allows the room to participate. Even when the original festival space cannot be reconstructed precisely from the transfer, the performance retains the feeling of sound being tested against architecture. Electronics and contact-based sources create not merely tones but apparent distances. One gesture may seem close enough to touch while another occupies the far edge of the room. The piece develops a geography that Werewolf Jerusalem’s wall deliberately refuses.
This difference prevents the split from becoming a simple contest in severity. Both sides belong to noise, but they propose nearly opposite relationships with change. Ramirez creates intensity through limitation. Matzus and Osborne create it through interaction. The first side seals the listener against a surface; the second opens a space populated by shifting signals.
Neither method is inherently more expressive. A static wall may contain enormous emotional weight precisely because it refuses theatrical gestures. Improvisation may produce emotional ambiguity because no participant completely controls the developing form. The split allows these ideas to coexist without forcing them into a synthesis.
The record is also a useful document of the Houston scene’s internal diversity. The same people could participate in harsh-noise walls, junk-noise groups, electroacoustic improvisation, drone, sound collage and queer performance without treating those practices as mutually exclusive careers. Projects functioned as different laboratories. A musician did not need one permanent identity when another name could create a new set of restrictions.
Unlimited Drift Recordings was part of that laboratory culture. Small labels did more than distribute finished work. They permitted relationships to become objects. A performance from 2010 could be paired with a studio recording from 2011, pressed onto one hundred records and sent outward as a concise statement about a local network. The label transformed proximity into circulation.
The edition of one hundred gives the release a physical intimacy matching its music. This was not a product intended to summarize either artist for a broad audience. It was a narrow doorway. Someone encountering Werewolf Jerusalem through this side would receive less than four minutes of the project’s reductionist method. Someone discovering In the Land of Archers would hear one live fragment from a project whose wider activity remained scattered across small editions and partially documented performances.
That scarcity makes the digital transfer especially valuable. The FLAC archive cannot reproduce the act of turning the record, the label design or the groove’s physical division, but it allows both sides to remain connected after the original edition has dispersed into private collections. The file preserves a record whose size and rarity might otherwise reduce it to a catalog entry.
The transfer also changes the pacing. Played digitally, the two tracks can follow one another without the silence and physical intervention required by vinyl. The wall dissolves, and the live performance begins. What was originally a deliberate act of reversal becomes an immediate transition from disappearance into communication.
That transition gives the split its lasting power. “Never to Be Found” does not discover what has vanished, and “He Taught Us How to Talk With Our Eyes” does not reveal who taught the lesson. Both titles preserve missing information. The music responds not by solving the mystery but by building forms around it: one dense and closed, the other unstable and shared.
For such a brief release, the emotional architecture is surprisingly large. It contains solitude and partnership, studio control and live uncertainty, concealment and recognition, the immovable wall and the glance exchanged across a room. Two sides, three people and seven minutes become a compact study of how noise can communicate precisely by refusing to speak plainly.
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