Oozing Meat - 2018 - Contaminated CS

Originally posted Jan 30, 2018 11:48PM

Dead Gods ‎– GODS18

The physical cassette already announces the basic vocabulary before anything is played: contamination, bodily matter, sickness, cheap reproduction and excessive information. The murky green-blue presentation, degraded imagery, tiny printed details and utilitarian cassette shell make it feel less like a polished album package than an infected object that happened to arrive in a plastic case. Dead Gods issued it as GODS18, and inside that small package Oozing Meat cram approximately nineteen minutes of material into 766 tracks. That number sounds absurd until the tape starts. Then it begins to feel completely logical.
Side A runs a little over nine and a half minutes and immediately establishes the method. Acoustic drums, harsh electronics, distorted vocals and bursts of feedback are chopped into pieces so short that the individual “tracks” frequently exist only as impacts. A blast begins, collapses, something screams through an effect, a drum pattern briefly finds its footing, and another mass of noise wipes it away. At other moments several of those elements simply pile on top of one another. The recording is rough and overloaded, but not featureless. There are substantial changes in frequency and density throughout the side, including passages where the low body suddenly drops away and thin electrical noise or near-silence creates a tiny opening before everything fills back in. Those interruptions are important because the cassette would be much less violent if it were merely loud all the time. The empty spaces turn the next impact into another beginning. There are also fleeting moments when the drums settle into something resembling an actual groove, but Oozing Meat seem almost allergic to letting one remain intact. Just as the body starts understanding a rhythm, it is cut apart.
Side B is almost exactly the same length but has a noticeably different weight. It spends more time in the low and middle frequencies, giving sections of it a thicker, uglier physical shove compared with the brighter abrasion of much of Side A. The constant mutation continues: short percussion explosions, blown-out voices, feedback, electronic squeal, tape-like interruptions and strange fragments that briefly sound organized before being swallowed. Some passages are almost comically brief. Calling them songs seems wrong, but calling the whole thing one continuous noise piece also misses what is happening. It is hundreds of microscopic decisions presented at a speed where structure becomes texture. Oozing Meat’s particular version of noisecore lives in that contradiction. Jason Hodges and Eric Tomillon use drums, vocals and electronics, but instead of stretching those materials into conventional compositions they compress them until a whole sequence can occur in the time another band might spend counting in.
That makes the ridiculous track count more than a joke printed on an insert. You really can hear the tape continually restarting itself. It draws from the vocabulary of early noisecore and grind, but harsh noise is just as important: long enough passages of feedback and damaged electronics appear that the listener can briefly sink into a sound before another barrage begins. Samples occasionally enter like foreign matter. Voices are often processed until language is less important than the wet, strangled or abrasive shape they make. The drums give the chaos a human physical center, especially because they do not sound cleaned up or separated from the room. Everything leaks into everything else. The cassette recording adds another layer of grit, so distortion is present not only as an effect but as part of the medium itself.
The name Oozing Meat is almost embarrassingly accurate for the sound. This music does not behave like a machine executing perfect digital edits even though the track count suggests microscopic precision. It lurches, sprays, clots, stops, starts and occasionally finds a pulse. That collision between obsessive counting and bodily mess is one of the cassette’s funniest qualities. There is something inherently absurd about declaring that this short tape contains 766 tracks, then making music chaotic enough that nobody could reasonably sit there and verify them without losing their mind.
Oozing Meat were the Richmond, Virginia duo of Eric Tomillon on vocals and electronics and Jason Hodges on drums, vocals and electronics, coming out of the same broader world as Fake Object, Suppression, Brown Piss and Chaotic Noise Productions. Their work repeatedly combined 1990s-style noisecore with harsh noise, horror samples, loops and industrial debris. On this cassette those ingredients are packed particularly tightly. It does not feel like harsh noise with drums added or grindcore obscured by electronics. The distinction keeps collapsing. Drumming becomes noise, feedback becomes punctuation, vocals become another frequency, and hundreds of “songs” become a single approximately nineteen-minute object.
The original Private Release post from January 2018 consisted almost entirely of the cassette, the Dead Gods catalog number and a download. Returning to the physical copy and making a fresh rip changes that considerably. Both sides can now be heard as complete cassette sides rather than merely represented by a link. The object, the strange arithmetic of 766 tracks and the actual degraded sound all finally occupy the same post. It remains completely unreasonable music, which is precisely what makes documenting it in detail worthwhile.
—ChatGPT

Plague Mother - 2018 - No Balm In Gilead CS

Originally posted Jan 30, 2018

Dead Gods ‎– GODS19

The packaging is beautifully economical: pale blue paper, heavy black photocopy texture, crooked borders, smeared toner and an image on the front that almost disappears into its own accumulation of lines. The spine is nearly swallowed by the repeated PLAGUE MOTHER lettering, while the back gives only the three titles, the Dead Gods mark and GODS#16. Inside, the cassette itself is completely clear except for a black-and-white paper label covered in repeating circular forms. Nothing about it feels polished or decorative. It has the blunt physical language of noise tapes: cheap materials pushed until their imperfections become part of the design.

Side A is entirely “Takotsubo,” roughly five minutes of extremely dense electronic pressure. It gets to work almost immediately and then stays remarkably committed to the same overloaded space. Rather than depending on obvious pauses or dramatic edits, the movement happens inside the mass itself: different frequencies scrape forward, recede and get buried, with the surface continually changing while the overall block remains intact. There is a constant coarse grain to it, somewhere between electrical interference, overloaded machinery and damaged amplification. The recording is loud but not flattened into an indistinguishable rectangle. Small fluctuations in level and texture keep opening cracks inside the noise, particularly through the middle, before the final section becomes brighter and more abrasive. It feels less like a sequence of events than being held inside one sustained event while its internal structure keeps rearranging itself.

Side B changes the proportions considerably. “Recovery Room” begins much quieter and darker, with low-frequency material sitting underneath a comparatively open surface. For the first minute especially there is space around the sound, which makes every rough edge more exposed. Gradually more upper-frequency noise begins entering the picture and the piece thickens without simply copying the wall on Side A. By the time “Anxiety Answering” takes over, the tape has reached a steadier, more pressurized electronic churn. The second half keeps a strong low and midrange body underneath sharper material, creating something heavy without becoming completely opaque. There is still plenty of abrasion, but the attraction is in the layering: dull mechanical weight underneath fizzing, tearing and increasingly bright electronic activity.

The three titles are especially good against this music: “Takotsubo,” “Recovery Room” and “Anxiety Answering.” They read almost like stages of a medical emergency, although the cassette never spells out a narrative for you. The title on the cover, “NO BALM IN GILEAD,” only deepens that feeling of injury, treatment and the possibility that treatment may not arrive. What I like is that none of this requires the noise to illustrate those ideas literally. The sound remains stubbornly physical. Pressure, grain, volume, electrical movement and the material character of the cassette do most of the communicating.

It is also a very compact release. There is no filler and almost no distance between the object and what comes out of it. The Xeroxed blue insert, clear shell, black geometric label and approximately ten minutes of harsh electronics all belong to the same small, severe thing. Eight years after originally putting this post up with essentially nothing but a download link, it is worth returning to the actual tape. There is much more here than that old post recorded.

—ChatGPT

TAZ 90 - 2020 - Volume 1: Contempt CS

Originally posted May 18, 2020

Dead Gods ‎– 048

Volume 1: Contempt is built as two long cassette sides rather than a sequence of individually titled songs, and that structure matters. Side A runs a little over fifteen minutes and Side B just over fifteen minutes, giving the tape the feeling of two related environments rather than an album broken into conventional tracks. The material is electronic, abrasive and heavily processed, but it is not simply a continuous wall of maximum volume. Much of the movement comes from changes in density, frequency and pressure.
Side A begins relatively exposed, with harsh electronic tones and distorted material occupying a lot of the upper and middle frequencies. Sounds scrape, buzz and swell against one another rather than forming a stable rhythm. There are moments where a recognizable human or vocal quality seems close to surfacing, but it remains buried enough inside the processing that the voice functions more as texture than communication. As the side develops, the sound thickens and thins repeatedly instead of following a straightforward rise toward a climax.
That shifting density is one of the more effective parts of the tape. When the signal becomes crowded, the noise feels physically compressed, with several layers competing for the same space. When material drops away, the remaining tones become much more exposed and uncomfortable. The quieter passages do not offer relief so much as make individual sounds easier to inspect. A thin electronic whine can become more threatening when nothing else is masking it.
Side B is slightly louder and more forceful overall. The sound has more continuous weight behind it, but it still avoids becoming completely static. Low and mid-frequency material gives sections of the side a heavier body while sharper tones cut through above it. The movement is gradual enough that changes can happen almost unnoticed until the texture has become substantially different from where it began.
What keeps both sides interesting is that the abrasion has shape. There are repeated shifts between compressed, noisy mass and more open sections where individual electronic elements become audible. That gives the recording a compositional sense even when there is no melody, beat or obvious narrative structure to follow. The listener ends up paying attention to pressure, surface and spatial relationships instead.
The cassette format suits this material particularly well. There is a constant physical floor underneath the electronics, and the edges of the harsher sounds are slightly softened by the recording medium. That does not make the tape gentle. It makes the noise feel contained inside something tangible. The hiss and saturation become part of the environment rather than distractions from it.
The artwork reinforces that bluntness. The presentation is sparse and confrontational, with little interest in making the object attractive in a conventional sense. The cassette and packaging feel more like documentation attached to an event than a polished commercial product. That fits music whose primary materials are pressure, distortion and sustained electronic discomfort.
The title Contempt is useful without needing to be treated as a literal program. The music does not explain who or what is being held in contempt, and it does not need to. The word establishes an emotional temperature: rejection, hostility, distance, refusal. The sound itself carries that temperature more effectively than an explanatory text would.
What is most effective here is the restraint inside the aggression. TAZ 90 does not fill every second with the same level of harshness. Space is allowed to appear, textures are permitted to change, and the two sides develop differently enough that the cassette never becomes one interchangeable thirty-minute block of noise. Side A feels more exposed and fragmented; Side B carries greater sustained weight.
The result is a short tape that rewards listening to the whole side rather than searching for individual moments. There are no conventional songs to extract and very little that behaves like a hook. The changes are cumulative. A frequency appears, another layer moves underneath it, something collapses, another sound becomes exposed, and the environment slowly reorganizes itself.
Volume 1: Contempt works best as a physical piece of sustained electronic pressure: two compact sides, no unnecessary structure imposed on them, and enough internal movement to keep the noise alive.
—ChatGPT