Macronympha - 2003 - Close To The Edge

 

Mother Savage Noise Productions – none  528.40MB FLAC

Close to the Edge presents Macronympha in its most effective format: one untitled, album-length block of sound with no track divisions to provide artificial relief. Issued in 2003 as a CDr through Solipsism, it is a characteristically obscure item even within the group’s enormous discography. The homemade medium suits the music. This is not noise polished into a prestige object or framed as an institutional electronic composition. It feels privately manufactured, physically circulated and intended to overwhelm whatever playback system receives it. Once started, the disc establishes a continuous environment of distorted metal, electrical pressure and unstable low-frequency motion.
The title inevitably recalls the 1972 Yes album, but Macronympha’s relationship with the long form is almost its inverse. There are no virtuoso solos, lyrical movements or carefully announced themes. The piece develops through density, texture and changes in pressure. Yet the joke is not entirely simple. Like a side-long progressive-rock composition, it asks to be heard as a complete duration rather than a sequence of interchangeable attacks. Its internal changes matter. A listener who hears only an undifferentiated wall misses the slow alterations in frequency, the appearance and disappearance of metallic bodies, and the way apparently static distortion continually changes its weight.
Macronympha was founded in Pittsburgh by Joseph Roemer and Rodger Stella at the beginning of the 1990s. Their signature method involved scrap metal, four-track tape, analogue electronics, effects pedals, overloaded recording levels and repeated acts of physical manipulation. That history remains audible on Close to the Edge, but the sound is not simply documentary industrial clanging. Metal is rarely allowed to remain an identifiable object. An impact enters a chain of distortion, is layered with other impacts and returns as a shuddering mass whose source might be a sheet of steel, damaged motor, shorted cable or collapsing piece of architecture.
The opening establishes a dense middle and lower register rather than attacking with a thin burst of treble. A broad rumble fills the field, already carrying several conflicting motions inside it. Some layers grind continuously; others strike, scrape or oscillate. High frequencies pass across the top like electrical arcs, but they are attached to substantial weight underneath. This balance is one reason Macronympha’s noise feels unusually physical. Volume alone does not create its force. The listener senses imagined mass: objects resisting pressure, surfaces dragging against one another and machinery working beyond its designed capacity.
There is no stable pulse, yet the material repeatedly approaches rhythm. Metallic impacts begin to recur at roughly similar intervals, only to be swallowed by distortion or displaced by another layer. A loop appears to form, but its edges have been damaged so severely that every repetition sounds different. This produces a kind of industrial lurch rather than a beat. The piece moves forward through momentum without becoming dance music, power electronics with a march tempo or the mechanically regular “rhythmic noise” that was prominent in the early 2000s.
Macronympha’s approach is frequently described as harsh noise wall, but Close to the Edge demonstrates why that term can be misleading when applied too rigidly. The sound is certainly wall-like in its refusal of silence and its near-continuous saturation. It does not, however, maintain one unchanging texture. The apparent wall is made of large unstable sections. One layer buckles, another moves forward, and a third disappears so gradually that its absence is recognized only after the overall color has changed. It is closer to watching an industrial fire move through a building than staring at a concrete surface.
The low end performs much of the compositional work. Deep electrical hum and distorted mechanical vibration create a foundation, but that foundation is never secure. It swells, clips and sometimes seems to pull the higher sounds downward. Headphones reveal overlapping bands of rumble rather than one bass drone. Through speakers, those same frequencies become architectural, interacting with the room and furniture. The piece changes according to playback volume because its bass is not merely heard; it modifies the listener’s physical surroundings.
Above that foundation, the high-frequency material is deliberately abrasive. Feedback tones flare without resolving into sustained pitches. Static breaks into hard grains, and thin squeals pass through the mix like stressed bearings. Macronympha avoids the common harsh-noise mistake of placing all frequencies at maximum intensity all the time. Treble may become dominant, but it does so against the memory of heavier passages. When a narrow band of piercing sound emerges from a broad roar, it feels sharper because the surrounding density has briefly changed shape.
The middle stretch is particularly effective at confusing foreground and background. A scrape that initially appears incidental may gradually become the most prominent element, while a heavy pulse recedes into haze. Sounds do not enter cleanly like instruments in a multitrack rock mix. They push through one another. This creates the impression that the recording itself is under stress, as if the tape, mixer and eventual CDr are not transparent carriers but additional materials being crushed alongside the metal.
That quality connects the release to Pittsburgh’s industrial geography without requiring a literal program. Macronympha’s earlier work often reflected the city’s deindustrialized landscape through amplified scrap and degraded recording technology. Close to the Edge does not need factory samples or documentary field recordings to evoke that environment. Its materials already carry histories of production, abandonment and reuse. Metal junk is not represented symbolically; it is given another working life as a source of sound.
The recording’s roughness is essential. Cleaner mastering might separate the layers more precisely, but it would also diminish the sense that they are contaminating one another. Distortion operates as both material and recording condition. When an impact clips, the resulting square-edged burst joins the original event. When several layers overload the available headroom, their collision produces a new composite texture. The piece is therefore not simply a performance captured imperfectly. The imperfections are part of the performance.
Macronympha’s noise is often distinguished from the rapid-cut style associated with some Japanese artists. Close to the Edge does not move by spraying hundreds of disconnected events across the stereo field. Its changes are slower, heavier and more cumulative. Instead of surprise through editing speed, it creates suspense by allowing a texture to continue until the listener begins noticing its internal instability. The question is not what sound will come next, but how long the present structure can endure before it deforms.
That method gives the piece an unusual relationship with time. Without track markers, the listener loses the normal means of measuring progress. The beginning does not present a theme, and the ending does not resolve one. Duration is felt through fatigue, adaptation and renewed attention. After prolonged exposure, the ear begins filtering the density and following small components: a dull recurring impact, a tremor in the bass or a narrow whistle buried behind the main distortion. When the balance changes, the entire field feels new even though its basic materials remain consistent.
The title becomes increasingly appropriate. The music remains close to an edge between motion and stasis, object and abstraction, control and collapse. It continually suggests that the next surge could become completely unmanageable, but Macronympha keeps enough control to preserve differentiation. Total chaos would actually be less intense. The sense of danger depends upon hearing structures form and then watching them fail.
There are no conventional vocals directing the emotional interpretation, and the absence benefits the piece. Macronympha’s imagery and surrounding aesthetic can be aggressively sexual, confrontational or antisocial, but Close to the Edge communicates primarily through material force. Its emotional character is not reducible to anger. There are passages of dread, grim humor, claustrophobia and even a severe kind of pleasure. The enjoyment comes from amplification revealing properties in ordinary discarded matter that polite sound would conceal.
The release is demanding even by noise standards. Its single-piece construction offers no convenient entry points, and sustained upper-frequency abrasion can become physically tiring. Listeners who require dramatic contrasts between quiet and loud may find its dynamic range narrow. At certain moments, the layers accumulate faster than the recording can meaningfully distinguish them, producing congestion rather than complexity. The modest CDr presentation also lacks the authority that a carefully manufactured LP or pressed CD might lend the material.
Yet that lack of authority is part of the appeal. Close to the Edge does not ask permission to belong to an established experimental canon. It arrives as an inexpensive underground CDr, containing one long action and little explanation. The listener must decide whether to enter it and how closely to listen. Beneath the initial brutality is a disciplined attention to weight, repetition and the transformation of physical objects through recording technology.
Macronympha’s best work makes harsh noise feel neither random nor overdesigned. The sound is organized, but its organization remains embodied and unstable. On Close to the Edge, scrap metal, feedback, bass pressure and tape-like saturation become components of a continuous structure that seems to be manufacturing and destroying itself at the same time. The piece never steps back to explain its process. It simply keeps pushing against the limits of its materials until the distinction between the object making the sound and the sound damaging the object disappears.

Von Einem - 2015 - The Von Einem Tapes 2xCD

 

Index Clean – IC-001  781.09MB FLAC

The Von Einem Tapes gathers seven cassettes recorded between 2011 and 2014 into a thirty-track, two-CD set lasting more than two hours. Such collections can expose every inconsistency accumulated across several years of small-edition releases, but this one feels remarkably unified. Mark Groves, the Australian musician behind Von Einem, had already established a narrow but surprisingly flexible vocabulary: processed speech, restrained industrial percussion, decaying electronics, low drones, metallic reverberations and sudden outbreaks of abrasive noise. Individual tapes may have been issued by different labels and created under slightly different circumstances, yet they appear to have originated inside the same sealed psychological environment. Mastered by Joe Talia, the compilation preserves their cassette-born roughness while giving the complete sequence enough continuity to function as something more substantial than a chronological clearinghouse.
Von Einem is named after Bevan Spencer von Einem, the only person convicted in connection with the group associated with Adelaide’s so-called Family murders. The project also draws upon other Australian crimes, psychological profiles and fragments of procedural language. That subject matter immediately creates an ethical problem. Naming a project after a convicted murderer risks directing fascination toward the offender, while the use of real cases can lend music an unearned appearance of seriousness. Groves generally avoids the theatrical aggression and domineering personality common to crime-fixated power electronics. His treated voice is clinical, flattened and often partially obscured, sounding closer to a damaged documentary narration than a performer assuming the identity of a killer. This distance does not resolve the problem completely, but it prevents the recordings from becoming straightforward exercises in murderer mythology.
The first disc is dominated by compressed scenes and abrupt pieces. “Silence and Brush Fences,” “Mummified Rather Than Dissolved,” “White Holden Sedan” and “Dirties” have titles that resemble isolated phrases extracted from police reports, local newspapers or inventories of evidence. The music behaves similarly. Sounds are presented as incomplete details rather than fully developed compositions: a pulse begins, a voice supplies several sentences, an electronic frequency shifts slightly, and then the piece ends before its implications become clear. Even the shortest tracks contribute to the cumulative pressure. They are not introductions to larger works so much as sealed rooms arranged along the same corridor.
Groves’ rhythms are especially effective because they rarely settle into conventional industrial momentum. The beats in “Dirties” and “Black Moods” thud rather than drive, repeating with the awkward regularity of machinery that has been repaired but not properly realigned. Synthesizer tones circle those impacts without releasing the tension they create. Elsewhere, junk-metal resonance, static and feedback occupy the foreground, although Von Einem seldom becomes a continuous wall of noise. Groves appears more interested in controlling empty space than overwhelming it. A sound can feel physically oppressive because of what has been removed around it: a lone impact echoes into silence, or a narrow frequency remains suspended after the voice has disappeared.
The processed narration gives the music much of its identity. Groves’ Australian accent remains audible beneath the treatments, grounding the work in a particular place rather than the anonymous dystopia inhabited by countless industrial projects. His delivery is calm to the point of emotional vacancy. It suggests someone reading a psychological assessment after every directly human response has been edited out. At its most effective, this method makes the listener conscious of how institutional language can convert suffering into a collection of dates, locations and behavioral patterns. At other moments, the recurring combination of impassive speech, low percussion and corrosive drone becomes predictable. Across thirty tracks, clinical detachment can harden into a formula.
The second disc opens the sound sufficiently to prevent that formula from consuming the collection. Distant, atonal piano appears in “Twice in the Head,” its notes sounding less composed than remembered from another room. “Forged Cheques” introduces an orchestral-string sample against crumbling drones and higher electronic squeals. These elements do not make the music lush; instead, they create brief suggestions of a wider emotional world that the prevailing numbness has suppressed. “Scripted Phases” places a fractured rhythmic framework beneath a windswept drone, while “Disturbed Then Refilled” returns to a thicker heavy-electronics pulse, a sustained midrange tone and a voice so altered that speech becomes another unstable texture.
This movement between recognizable detail and abstraction is crucial. The record is least convincing when its criminal references are expected to provide all the gravity. It is considerably stronger when the sound independently generates unease—when an object seems to be dragged beyond the microphone, when a rhythm falls out of alignment, or when a voice is reduced to consonants and electrical residue. The real cases should not function as decorative horror material, and the compilation occasionally comes uncomfortably close to allowing evocative titles to do work that the compositions have not earned. Yet its best pieces resist spectacle. They make violence feel bureaucratic, regional and concealed inside ordinary environments.
Vehicle references such as “White Holden Sedan” and “Orange Sigma” intensify that specifically Australian atmosphere. They are mundane objects, but their placement among descriptions of damaged bodies, forged documents and disturbed sites makes familiarity itself unsettling. The landscape implied by The Von Einem Tapes is not a gothic ruin or fantastical torture chamber. It is made from suburbs, roads, institutional interiors and quiet stretches of land. Groves’ “Thornbury Bunker” recordings repeatedly turn ordinary spaces into acoustic containers. The result is closer to forensic industrial music than horror soundtrack imitation.
The later portion of the set contains several longer pieces, including “A Group That Preyed on Itself,” “Hope Forest” and the concluding “Lower Light.” Here the tight miniatures begin to stretch into more patient environments. Sounds are permitted to deteriorate gradually, and the listener becomes aware of layers that would have been cut short on the earlier tracks. “Lower Light” is particularly well placed at the end. It does not offer a climax or explanation; it lets the compilation recede into a dimmer, less definite space. After so much processed information, the lack of resolution feels appropriate.
Talia’s mastering is essential to the success of this progression. The recordings retain differences in density and fidelity, as material sourced from seven independent cassette releases should, but changes in volume and texture do not make the compilation feel randomly assembled. The grain is preserved without allowing it to blur every piece into the same grey surface. The sequence also benefits from the alternation between one- or two-minute fragments and works lasting four, six or more minutes. Two uninterrupted hours of Von Einem’s restricted palette would be punishing in an unproductive way; the short pieces create exits, resets and changes of scale.
The six-panel wallet and accompanying booklet frame the release as a complete early-period statement, but the music remains more interesting than its packaging or scarcity. The Von Einem Tapes documents Groves learning how much he can remove from industrial noise while maintaining its physical menace. Its weaknesses are inseparable from that method: repetitions accumulate, voices sometimes lapse into generalized ominousness, and the invocation of actual crimes remains morally uneasy. Nevertheless, the compilation develops a distinct character through restraint, regional specificity and close attention to pacing. Rather than shouting its transgressions, Von Einem speaks quietly from inside a deteriorating mechanism. The listener is left to decide whether that voice is documenting the darkness, exploiting it or demonstrating how easily the two activities can become indistinguishable.

VA - (2008) Hated Perversions CD

 Institute Of Paraphilia Studies ‎– none

 Tracklist
1     –Nicole 12     Liquid Voyeur     3:39
2     –Nicole 12     Vogue Bambini     4:56
3     –Sick Seed     Agenda     3:07
4     –Sick Seed     Matronage     4:06
5     –Bizarre Uproar     Sieg Hail     8:07
6     –Eleczema     Ice Cold Enema     3:52
7     –Eleczema     Bob's Penis     4:11
8     –Grunt     Will To Do Damage     4:10
9     –Taint     Dedicated To Male Rape Group     5:35
10     –Dorchester Library     Incest Tales     2:38
11     –Control      Suffocate And Silent     7:01

Hated Perversions does not ease the listener into its world or disguise what it has been designed to do. Released by Freak Animal Records in 2008 as part of the label’s Institute of Paraphilia Studies series, the compilation brings together eleven exclusive pieces by Nicole 12, Sick Seed, Bizarre Uproar, Eleczema, Grunt, Taint, Dorchester Library and Control. The title establishes a deliberately repellent framework, while the original edition’s black, leather-like tall case and twenty-eight-page booklet turn the CD into something resembling a privately circulated case file. This is power electronics as confrontation, but the compilation is more varied than its imagery initially suggests. Behind the sexual pathology, poisoned language and acts of provocation lies an unusually strong survey of several different approaches to noise: whispered analogue minimalism, primitive rhythmic electronics, overloaded feedback, low-frequency pressure and long-form death-industrial escalation.
Freak Animal issued only 250 copies, yet the release was not presented as a modest homemade disc. Its elaborate construction gave it the physical authority of a prohibited document. Each participating artist received space within the booklet to interpret the subject, producing a catalogue of fantasies, taboos and deliberately objectionable images. The resulting package became more notorious than the audio and was eventually excluded from some online marketplaces. It is important, however, not to mistake controversy for achievement. Extreme imagery can create an instant reputation without requiring much artistic ability. The real test of Hated Perversions is whether the music generates its own disturbance after the booklet is closed. Much of it does. Its best selections make discomfort audible through pressure, repetition and damaged vocal presence rather than depending entirely upon their titles.
Nicole 12 opens the compilation with “Liquid Voyeur” and “Vogue Bambini.” The project’s analogue synthesizer tones are simple, close and oppressive, with little interest in conventional development. “Liquid Voyeur” combines an insistent electronic current with whispered vocals that seem to enter directly through the listener’s headphones. The track’s intimacy is more unpleasant than a barrage would have been. Instead of shouting from across a room, the voice behaves as though it has already invaded one’s personal space. “Vogue Bambini” is colder and less insinuating, replacing the first piece’s humid closeness with a more sterile arrangement of noise and processed speech. Together the tracks establish one of the collection’s central tensions: desire represented not as pleasure or release, but as obsessive attention stripped of ordinary human reciprocity.
That distinction matters because Hated Perversions continually moves between the suggestive and the physically brutal. Nicole 12 works through quiet fixation, whereas Sick Seed arrives with a rougher and more outwardly aggressive attack. “Agenda” and “Matronage” were the first officially released Sick Seed recordings, marking Pekka Perä-Takala’s transition from the harsh-noise project Gelsomina into a form better suited to structure, voice and psychological narrative. The sound remains corroded, but it no longer behaves like noise generated for its own sake. Buried rhythms give the distortion a forward pull, while the vocal performance supplies a recognizable human antagonist. The pieces seem organized around compulsion: sounds return not because they form a chorus, but because the music cannot stop revisiting them.
“Agenda” is comparatively direct, joining a tense electronic foundation to a voice that sounds both accusatory and trapped within its own fixation. “Matronage” is heavier and more contaminated, allowing layers to accumulate until the distinction between vocal distortion, amplifier damage and background movement becomes difficult to maintain. Sick Seed’s contribution points toward the project’s later ability to combine power electronics with more carefully paced industrial composition. Even here, at the beginning, the music has architecture. It does not merely turn everything upward and hope that volume will create meaning.
Bizarre Uproar’s “Sieg Hail” is a different kind of ugliness. The project has always understood that noise can become theatrical without becoming polished, using repetition, humiliation and damaged bodily presence to make a performance feel unstable. Here, the title’s warped spelling already turns a familiar fascist salute into something slurred and degraded. The track does not possess the clean, militant posture suggested by authoritarian imagery. Its noise is sickly, overdriven and physically unbalanced, with vocals pushing through a dense electrical surface that seems ready to collapse. Rather than presenting power as disciplined strength, Bizarre Uproar makes it sound diseased and compulsive.
That does not neutralize the symbolism or guarantee a critical interpretation. Power electronics often relies upon ambiguity, then leaves the audience to determine whether an image is being exposed, inhabited or simply used because it produces a reaction. Hated Perversions repeatedly occupies that unresolved space. Its aesthetic assumes that disgust is useful in itself, yet disgust does not automatically become insight. Bizarre Uproar succeeds primarily because the sound refuses heroic grandeur. Whatever domination is being enacted has already deteriorated into obsession, grime and loss of control.
Eleczema’s “Ice Cold Enema” and “Bob’s Penis” provide the compilation’s crudest change in tone. Compared with the tightly managed pressure surrounding them, these tracks feel more absurd, primitive and deliberately embarrassing. Their blunt titles strip away any pretense of refined transgression. The sound follows suit, using rough bursts, broken rhythmic gestures and an almost juvenile fixation upon the body. This grotesque humor is valuable to the sequence because an entire disc of solemn depravity would become unintentionally pompous. Eleczema punctures that seriousness, although the joke is less one of liberation than degradation. The body becomes ridiculous machinery: leaking, manipulated and deprived of dignity.
Grunt’s “Will to Do Damage” brings the compilation sharply back into focus. The title reads like a concise definition of power electronics, and the track avoids unnecessary ornament. It is built from forceful vocal declaration, grinding frequencies and a hard internal momentum that turns intention into action. Grunt’s sound is full but not shapeless; separate layers of distortion remain audible even when the track reaches maximum density. A lower mechanical body provides mass, abrasive midrange frequencies create motion, and the voice cuts across both. Instead of inviting the listener to examine an atmosphere, “Will to Do Damage” pushes forward with a single declared objective.
Mikko Aspa’s involvement in the label and multiple projects connected with the collection gives Hated Perversions a strongly Finnish center, but the international contributors keep it from becoming a Freak Animal family sampler. Taint’s “Dedicated to Male Rape Group” is especially significant as one of the final pieces issued under the Taint name before Keith Brewer continued developing related methods as Mania. The track contains recognizably Taint-like feedback squeals, low frequencies, agitated breathing and vocals that repeatedly disappear into the noise. It feels simultaneously controlled and feverish. Unlike Grunt’s frontal violence, Taint produces anxiety by making the listener wait for elements to return.
The breathing is particularly effective because it supplies the track with an unstable physical scale. It can be heard as exertion, panic, arousal or proximity to the microphone, and none of those possibilities is comfortable. High feedback traces narrow paths above the bass pressure while the vocal performance materializes only long enough to unsettle the balance. The result demonstrates why Taint remained so influential within American harsh noise and power electronics: Brewer could make a limited group of frequencies feel psychologically active. The sound does not simply occupy space. It watches, withdraws and approaches again.
Dorchester Library’s “Incest Tales” is a short collision of drums, feedback and disorder. Lasting less than three minutes, it behaves almost like an interruption between Taint’s tightly controlled unease and Control’s extended finale. Its brevity works in its favor. The piece does not develop far enough to establish the identity heard in the compilation’s strongest contributions, but its crude percussion creates a sudden physical commotion. After so many selections built around private obsession, “Incest Tales” resembles a room being violently disturbed. It is messy, immediate and gone before its limited materials become exhausting.
Control closes the disc with “Suffocate and Silent,” the compilation’s great long-form release of pressure. Thomas Garrison begins slowly, using dark sustained tones and spacious low-end movement to create a sense of confinement. The early minutes are patient enough to make each additional layer feel consequential. Frequencies gradually thicken, the available air seems to diminish, and the piece grows from a haunted industrial environment into a destructive mass. Where several preceding artists rely on immediate disgust or direct vocal aggression, Control earns intensity through duration. The final noise feels enormous because the listener has heard it being assembled.
This ending also reveals how intelligently the compilation is sequenced. It begins with Nicole 12 whispering at close range, passes through Sick Seed’s emerging structures, Bizarre Uproar’s diseased overload, Eleczema’s grotesque absurdity, Grunt’s concentrated attack and Taint’s anxious feedback, then allows Control to expand everything into a broad field of suffocating sound. The collection is not a continuous wall, nor is it merely eleven unrelated exclusives. Each project uses a different relationship between voice and noise. Sometimes speech commands the electronics; sometimes it is buried, fractured or reduced to breath. That changing hierarchy gives the CD a dramatic arc even when its lyrical preoccupations remain narrow.
The booklet complicates any attempt to separate sonic merit from sensationalism. Its visual material was intended to cross boundaries, but some representations do not remain harmless merely because they appear within an underground art context. The use of sexualized child imagery, even when digitally manipulated, raises concerns far beyond ordinary obscenity and helped make the release legally questionable in some jurisdictions. This cannot be dismissed with the familiar claim that all provocation is an examination of censorship. At points the package appears less interested in analyzing exploitation than in testing how close it can come to reproducing exploitative imagery while retaining the protection of “art.”
That uncertainty is part of the record’s history, but it should not be romanticized. The compilation demonstrates both the capabilities and limitations of transgressive noise. Its artists are skilled at generating coercion, claustrophobia and shame through sound, yet the conceptual framework frequently treats vulnerable people as raw material for somebody else’s confrontation. One can recognize the strength of Control’s construction, Taint’s frequency work or Sick Seed’s rhythmic development without pretending that every accompanying image gains depth through association with difficult music. Shock may open a door, but it cannot decide what lies on the other side.
Sixteen years after its release, Hated Perversions remains a severe and musically effective power-electronics compilation whose reputation is inseparable from a package that deliberately pursued exclusion. The audio survives closer scrutiny better than many controversy-driven records do. Its eight projects do not sound interchangeable, and the movement from invasive whispers to overwhelming industrial mass gives the disc an unusually coherent shape. “Will to Do Damage,” Taint’s contribution and “Suffocate and Silent” are particularly formidable, while Sick Seed’s debut captures a project discovering the possibilities of structure inside abrasion. The collection’s subject matter remains ethically compromised, sometimes analytically suggestive and sometimes merely ugly. That friction cannot be cleaned away—and cleaning it away would misrepresent the release. Hated Perversions is strongest when its noise exposes compulsion as cramped, repetitive and spiritually empty. It is weakest when forbidden imagery is allowed to substitute for the same hard work.

 

Taint + Goat - 2001 - Live Action Houston TX

 

Biteworks – 001cdr  233.61MB FLAC

Live Action Houston, TX preserves two extended noise performances without attempting to disguise the unstable conditions of the room in which they occurred. Taint and Goat are given one track apiece, and the division makes immediate sense: this is not a collaboration or split assembled from unrelated studio leftovers, but a paired document of two artists testing their sounds against the same physical environment. Released by Keith Brewer’s Biteworks label in 2001 as a CD-R limited to approximately thirty copies, it has the secrecy and roughness of something passed directly between performers, label contacts and serious noise collectors. The recording does not convert either set into a polished album. It retains overloaded frequencies, uncertain distance, room resonance and the sensation that the sound is exceeding whatever equipment was available to capture it.
The performances appear to come from the Dead Audio Music Festival held at Houston’s Superstitious Art Warehouse on September 22, 2001. The enormous lineup also included Black Leather Jesus, Concrete Violin, Rotten Piece, Stimbox, Xome, T.E.F., Steel Hook Prostheses and numerous Texas-area experimental projects. It was less a conventional concert than a concentrated gathering of the American noise network as it existed before social media, streaming archives or readily available digital distribution. The event occurred through mail, flyers, phone calls, personal introductions and packages of cassettes sent between people who might know one another only through project names. A tiny CD-R like this extended the festival afterward, allowing thirty listeners to hear a fraction of what had happened inside the warehouse.
Some online databases list the title as Live Action Austin, TX, but contemporary Taint documentation identifies it as a Houston recording, and both Taint and Goat appear on the surviving Dead Audio festival lineup. The confusion is characteristic of an object issued so privately that there was never a standardized commercial listing to correct later copies of the information. Biteworks assigned it the label’s first CD-R catalog number, but the presentation remained closer to a personal artifact than a formal debut. Its scarcity was not an artificial collector’s strategy so much as a reflection of how these recordings moved: burned in small batches, packaged by hand and circulated until the available copies were gone.
Taint opens the disc with a performance that demonstrates why Keith Brewer’s work stood apart from simpler definitions of power electronics. The set is violent, but its violence does not depend upon uninterrupted maximum volume. Brewer works with contrast, allowing a thin electrical whistle or low mechanical vibration to establish itself before forcing another sound through it. Frequencies seem to bend under pressure. Harsh midrange currents scrape against heavier bass movement, while sudden vocal eruptions transform the electronics from an abstract system into a confrontation. The room recording blurs the equipment’s edges, but it also gives every change in intensity a physical dimension.
Brewer had been developing Taint since the beginning of the 1990s, moving from a one-shot fanzine name into one of the most distinctive American harsh-noise projects of the decade. By 2001, releases such as Victimology, Whoredom, Dau ghter: Victimology 2 and Justmeat had established a recognizable language of sexual pathology, criminal obsession and psychological damage. Vice, issued the same year as this performance, showed how tightly Brewer could organize that material in the studio. The Houston recording offers the opposite perspective. It removes the carefully constructed packaging and much of the verbal framework, leaving the listener with gesture, pressure and the decisions being made in real time.
The Taint set does not unfold like a studio composition played from beginning to end. It sounds assembled at the point of impact. Brewer introduces an abrasive texture, lets it grind against the room, then cuts or redirects it before it becomes passive. The most effective passages are those in which several unstable layers remain separately audible: a buried low-frequency engine, a narrow feedback tone and a harsher surface that repeatedly tears open. Rather than merging into one undifferentiated roar, these components compete for space. The listener can hear the performance changing shape as Brewer adjusts the balance, pushes a signal too far or abruptly withdraws an element that had seemed permanent.
The voice appears less as narration than as physical material. Words are partially destroyed by distortion, microphone overload and the volume surrounding them. What survives is breath, strain and cadence. This makes the live performance different from Taint recordings in which titles, samples or printed material direct the interpretation. Here the body behind the electronics becomes the primary subject. Brewer’s shouts do not stand majestically above the noise; they struggle inside it. That struggle prevents the set from becoming a demonstration of domination. The machinery can swallow its operator as readily as it can be used against an audience.
Room sound is essential to the recording’s effect. A studio version might have offered deeper bass, cleaner separation and more precisely edited transitions, but it would not contain the same sense of air being displaced inside a warehouse. The recording saturates when the set becomes dense, flattening some detail while producing a hard ceiling against which the sound can push. Far from ruining the performance, this limitation reveals its scale. Noise music is often described through equipment and frequencies, but live noise also involves architecture: concrete, open floor space, inadequate electrical systems, bodies absorbing sound and walls returning it several milliseconds later.
Goat’s performance occupies that architecture differently. Andy O’Sullivan’s project would become associated with dense, sustained harsh noise and the nearly immovable structures later described as harsh noise wall. The Houston set contains that drive toward density, but it is not static. Goat begins with a more dispersed field of hiss, rumble and damaged electronic movement, then gradually compresses those materials. Where Taint’s section feels argumentative, constantly setting one frequency against another, Goat’s performance is accumulative. Sounds pile up until their individual origins become irrelevant and the room is occupied by a broad, granular mass.
This does not mean the Goat set is featureless. Its activity takes place inside the noise rather than through dramatic stops and starts. Static shifts in thickness; low frequencies rise sufficiently to change the apparent weight of the entire field; sharper feedback edges emerge and then become buried again. Listening at low volume can make the piece seem like an extended block, but greater volume exposes its internal turbulence. The surface continually flakes, folds and renews itself. Instead of delivering a succession of events, O’Sullivan establishes a hostile condition and explores how long it can remain physically compelling.
The live recording intensifies that method because microphone saturation introduces another layer that Goat can effectively absorb. It is sometimes impossible to determine whether a rough edge originates from the performance, the public-address system or the recording device. That uncertainty becomes part of the piece. The warehouse, recorder and audience position are no longer neutral channels carrying the work; they are additional distortion units. Every stage of transmission damages the original signal, but the damage is precisely what gives this document its grain. A clean board recording might reveal more equipment detail while sacrificing the abrasive atmospheric depth heard here.
Placed after Taint, Goat also changes the listener’s understanding of duration. Brewer’s set advances through confrontation and redirection, creating suspense around what will be introduced or cut next. O’Sullivan suspends that kind of expectation. Once Goat’s mass reaches full density, the question is not where it will go but how long the listener can remain attentive to microscopic change. This is one of the fundamental divisions within harsh noise: sound as a chain of forceful actions versus sound as a space into which one enters. Live Action Houston, TX presents both approaches without needing to announce the distinction.
The pairing also captures a productive moment in American noise. Taint represented an established 1990s network rooted in mail-order releases, handmade editions and the confrontational tradition of power electronics. Goat pointed toward the increasingly austere noise of the following decade, in which continuous texture, anonymity and extreme reduction would become central concerns. Neither set fits perfectly into a historical category, but hearing them together reveals a shift underway. Brewer treats feedback as a weapon wielded through performance; O’Sullivan treats it as an environment capable of continuing after the performer’s personality has receded.
As a live CD-R, the release carries weaknesses that should not be mistaken for mysteries. Some passages lose definition when the recording overloads. The lowest frequencies cannot be reproduced with the force they probably had in the room, while occasional transitions feel determined by practical equipment handling rather than compositional necessity. There is little contextual information within the audio itself, and listeners expecting the elaborate conceptual framing of major Taint releases may find it skeletal. Yet those limitations are honest. The disc does not pretend that a microphone placed in a warehouse can reproduce the bodily experience of standing near a noise performance.
What it can preserve is time, action and proximity. Small fluctuations in volume suggest movement around the equipment. Feedback catches and changes angle. A voice enters with more force than the recorder can accept. The noise strikes the room and comes back altered. These details prevent Live Action Houston, TX from functioning as a generic bootleg. It captures not only two sets but two different beliefs about what a live noise set should accomplish. Taint creates drama by forcing unstable elements into conflict. Goat reduces drama until attention settles upon the changing substance of noise itself.
The release is also a reminder of how fragile underground documentation can be. An edition of thirty CD-Rs could easily vanish through disc rot, damaged surfaces, dead websites and collections dispersed after their owners’ deaths. Even its city has been inconsistently recorded. Yet the audio survives as evidence of a large Houston gathering and of two artists at a meaningful point in their development. It does not require exaggerated claims about rarity to justify attention. The performances are strong because they remain active, tactile and distinctly different from one another.
Live Action Houston, TX ultimately succeeds through the simplicity of its construction: one room, two artists and two uninterrupted encounters with amplified sound. Taint offers the more volatile performance, carving passages of feedback, vocal strain and mechanical pressure into a changing sequence. Goat answers with density, allowing a slowly consolidated field to absorb equipment, architecture and recording damage. The CD-R documents an evening, but it also stages a useful argument between movement and stasis. Nothing is polished enough to erase the warehouse, and nothing is so chaotic that the identities of the artists disappear. More than two decades later, the room remains audible around them, holding the noise for thirty vanished copies and anyone who encounters the recording afterward.

Taint - 2004 - Misogynist Lust

 

Freak Animal Records – Freak-CD-021  309.63MB FLAC

Misogynist Lust begins with no gradual descent into its subject. “Undeserving” immediately establishes a compact, frontal sound built from rough analogue pressure, needling feedback and a voice fighting to remain intelligible inside the electronics. The album contains ten pieces in approximately forty minutes, and almost all of them stay between three and six minutes. That economy distinguishes it from power electronics records that depend upon extended drones or twenty-minute displays of endurance. Keith Brewer attacks, develops one diseased combination of frequencies and stops before it can settle into background noise. The 2004 Freak Animal CD is consequently severe but highly active: a sequence of individual wounds rather than one long grey wall.
The material originated in the late 1990s, first appearing through the Italian Slaughter Productions Listen and Die! cassette box and then as a self-released Taint Entertainment tape limited to twenty-eight copies. Freak Animal’s CD edition expanded its circulation to 300 copies and gave the recordings a permanence that their original cassette existence could not guarantee. The label did not polish Taint into a cleaner European power-electronics product. Tape grain, overloaded signals and abrupt edits remain fundamental to the sound. The CD makes those surfaces more immediate, exposing numerous small movements that could disappear behind hiss on a heavily played cassette.
“Undeserving,” “Dirty Blonde Whore,” “Streetmeat” and “Whoremonger” form a brutally concentrated opening run. Brewer’s electronics do not resemble industrial machinery operating with regular efficiency. They feel unstable, as though every device has been pushed beyond its intended range. Low tones buckle beneath high feedback, distortion splits into several competing bands, and voices repeatedly emerge only to be crushed back into the mix. There are pulses, but rarely anything as orderly as a beat. Momentum comes from escalation: a frequency thickens, another sharpens, and the available space contracts until something must be removed.
This is what separates Brewer from performers who treat aggression as a matter of shouting over static. Taint’s sound has architecture. Even at its harshest, one can hear foreground, depth and movement between layers. “Dirty Blonde Whore” drives a coarse vocal attack through a narrow channel of scraping electronics, while “Streetmeat” places greater weight on the low end, giving its abrasion a heavier physical body. “Whoremonger” stretches its material into a crawling, hostile churn. The pieces share a vocabulary, but they do not merely duplicate one another. Each finds a different balance between vocal presence, bass pressure and upper-frequency pain.
Contributions associated with Thomas Garrison of Control, Jonathan Canady of Deathpile and the obscure Ultra connect the album to a broader American network of late-1990s noise. Their presence does not turn Misogynist Lust into a series of obvious collaborations. Instead, additional source sounds seem to have been incorporated into Brewer’s compositional method, cut apart and made to serve Taint’s atmosphere. This was common in the cassette underground: artists exchanged recordings through the mail, processed one another’s material and created collaborations without sharing a studio. The sound passed from machine to machine, accumulating damage and losing any clean point of origin.
“Every Little Girl” is one of the album’s most sustained and disturbing constructions. It develops slowly enough for its component sounds to become individually recognizable before they are forced together. A low industrial foundation supplies weight, thin feedback hangs above it, and a processed voice enters with the detached quality of recorded testimony or institutional speech. The track does not produce horror through a sudden blast. It creates an environment in which implication grows more oppressive as the listener waits. Brewer understood that anticipation can be more effective than continuous attack, especially when the title has already contaminated how every sound will be interpreted.
The naming throughout Misogynist Lust is deliberately degrading. Women are reduced to commodities, physical types, sexual functions or locations attached to violent stories. The album does not provide a stable critical distance from that language. It inhabits an offender’s vocabulary so completely that documentation, role-playing, exposure and endorsement become difficult to separate. Such uncertainty was central to a strain of power electronics influenced by true-crime writing, extreme pornography and the confrontational methods of Whitehouse, Sutcliffe Jügend and Peter Sotos. Taint’s work pushes that ambiguity further by refusing explanatory liner notes that might offer the listener an approved interpretation.
That refusal remains the album’s central ethical problem. The music convincingly represents obsession as ugly, repetitive and isolating, but the titles still transform violence against women and girls into material for an overwhelmingly male underground audience. One cannot assume that extremity automatically equals criticism. At the same time, the record never makes its fantasies sound liberating, glamorous or triumphant. Brewer’s world is cramped and spiritually dead. Desire has curdled into compulsion; the voice issuing commands sounds imprisoned inside the same electrical enclosure it attempts to control. The album’s most persuasive interpretation lies in that contradiction rather than in any claim that its provocations are harmless.
“Laura Smithers, Friendswood TX” gives the sequence a specific geographical wound. The title refers to the 1997 disappearance and murder of a twelve-year-old girl from Friendswood, Texas, south of Houston. Brewer lived in Waco, and this use of a nearby Texas case removes the distancing effect common to records built around famous European atrocities or legendary serial killers. The track is notably concise. Feedback flashes across a murky background while voices and source material pass through without forming a conventional narrative. It supplies no biography or explanation. A name and location are placed inside noise, leaving the listener to confront how real suffering has been converted into an aesthetic object.
The title track follows with one of the album’s fullest combinations of voice and electronics. “Misogynist Lust” does not move toward a recognizable climax; it tightens. Brewer stacks rough, dragging frequencies until the vocal performance seems physically pinned beneath them. High tones cut through the mass, but they offer no release. The piece is less a declaration than a demonstration of fixation consuming itself. Its sound circles repeatedly around the same psychic blockage, gaining power through small adjustments in density rather than large changes of direction.
“Sluttish” provides another variation on that method, with a more agitated surface and a voice that arrives in broken bursts. It is followed by “Show Me,” whose command-like title prepares the listener for a more direct confrontation. Yet the track’s electronics remain more interesting than its verbal aggression. Brewer creates an unstable middle register that seems to wobble between feedback and damaged amplification. A thick lower signal periodically enters and alters the scale of the entire mix. These shifts make the piece feel larger than the limited equipment likely used to create it. Taint’s production is crude, but never careless.
“Wackelpeter” closes the CD in only ninety-one seconds. Associated with Ultra, it feels less like a grand conclusion than an ugly fragment left moving after the main sequence has exhausted itself. Its brevity is perfectly judged. After forty minutes of tightly constructed hostility, an extended finale would risk making the record feel ceremonious. Instead, Misogynist Lust ends abruptly, denying the listener a cleansing fade or dramatic resolution. The final sound disappears, but the language printed across the track list remains.
The 2004 CD sequence differs somewhat from surviving descriptions of the original cassette, which included additional or separately indexed material and arranged the pieces in another order. Freak Animal’s edition makes the album feel more deliberate by beginning with “Undeserving,” placing the title track deep into the second half and using “Wackelpeter” as a brief exit. That structure creates a clear progression from frontal attacks through increasingly psychological pieces. The forty-minute running time is another strength. Brewer maintains intensity without stretching every idea beyond its useful life.
Production is the album’s greatest accomplishment. Its high frequencies are painful without becoming a uniform digital screech, and its bass remains dirty rather than inflated into modern subsonic spectacle. The voice changes function from track to track: sometimes an attacker, sometimes a documentary fragment and sometimes another piece of material being ground down. Tape noise supplies atmosphere without concealing the construction. Even moments that initially resemble formless distortion reveal cycles, edits and deliberate shifts when heard closely. Brewer’s control over abrasive sound explains why the record endured beyond its microscopic original edition.
Misogynist Lust also captures Taint at a transition point. Earlier recordings frequently carried the instability of cassette experimentation, while later works such as Vice, Sex Sick and Brewer’s Mania material would develop heavier structures and more intricate editing. These recordings retain the rawness of the former while anticipating the compositional discipline of the latter. The result is not Taint’s most varied album, but it may be one of the clearest demonstrations of Brewer’s ability to turn a few primitive electronic sources into distinct physical spaces.
Its reputation as a power-electronics classic is therefore understandable, though the word “classic” should not neutralize what the record asks an audience to consume. The album’s language is intentionally hateful, its use of real victims is ethically unresolved, and its conceptual ambiguity can provide convenient cover for listeners interested only in degradation. None of those objections erases the precision of the sound. Brewer constructs feedback with exceptional patience, knows when to let a vocal dominate and recognizes when a piece has reached its endpoint. Misogynist Lust remains powerful because those contradictions cannot be comfortably separated. It is a technically focused, physically punishing record built around fantasies and realities that should resist comfortable appreciation. The sound does not absolve the concept, and the concept does not exhaust the sound.

Mysogyny - 1989 - Skrag

 

Dead Mind Records – DMR41  354.46MB FLAC

Skrag begins before Keith Brewer had fully decided what his noise should become. Recorded and released in 1989 under the deliberately misspelled name Mysogyny, the cassette predates Taint, the project through which Brewer would become one of the defining figures in American power electronics and harsh noise. There are no titles, samples explaining a concept or printed narratives directing the listener toward a particular crime. Instead, Skrag presents crude electronic pressure, tape manipulation, scraped metal, overloaded signals and domestic room sound as eight untitled pieces. It is primitive even by the standards of late-1980s cassette noise, but its lack of refinement is precisely what gives the recording its unsettled character.
The original tape circulated in the United States through Big Body Parts as BBP-063, with a European version handled by Peter Zincken’s Nihilistic Recordings. This placed a teenage Brewer inside an international mail-art network before he had established a recognizable discography. Cassettes crossed borders through handwritten correspondence, photocopied catalogs and trades between artists who might never meet. Sound quality changed with each duplication, and different editions could contain alternate edits or missing material. That instability became part of Skrag: the master preserved by Zincken includes several short pieces absent from the known Big Body Parts version.
Dead Mind Records returned to that longer master in 2020, after Brewer’s death in November 2019, and issued two cassette editions of fifty copies. Its eight tracks last approximately fifty-six minutes, ranging from brief two-minute interruptions to an eighteen-minute central piece. Heard in this more complete form, Skrag is not merely an undeveloped version of Taint. It belongs to an earlier language of industrial cassette culture, when a recording could be assembled from whatever machinery, objects, cheap microphones and damaged tape decks happened to be available. The distinction between an instrument, an accident and a recording defect is continually erased.
The opening piece establishes that uncertainty with a compact field of abrasion. Sounds scrape past one another without settling into a stable rhythm, while the cassette grain binds them into one rough surface. The longer second section expands the idea. Low mechanical rumbling occupies the background as sharper noises enter, disappear and return at altered levels. Brewer does not yet display the precise control over feedback that would distinguish his later work, but he already understands tension. He can leave an unpleasant frequency hanging long enough for it to become physically irritating, then replace it with something heavier rather than offering relief.
There is little conventional power-electronics vocalizing. When traces of voices or human activity emerge, they are swallowed by processing and distance. The body is present through handling: objects are moved, tape machines are operated, and signals are pushed until the recording medium responds. Instead of a vocalist dominating electronic accompaniment, Skrag lets the equipment become the central performer. Brewer seems to be testing how much violence can be suggested by friction, repetition and amplification alone. The results are closer to private experimental action than a staged industrial concert.
The two sides work on different scales. Short pieces behave like sudden discoveries: a useful sound is found, worried for several minutes and abandoned. The longer passages are less impatient. The eleven-minute second track and eighteen-minute fifth track allow layers to deteriorate in real time. Repetitions do not return exactly as they began because tape speed, microphone placement and manual interference keep altering them. What initially resembles a static drone begins to reveal pulses, unstable overtones and partially buried events. Brewer’s later recordings would organize these details more forcefully, but the attraction to contaminated repetition is already unmistakable.
The eighteen-minute centerpiece is the recording’s strongest demonstration of endurance. It does not build toward a clean climax. Instead, a collection of coarse sounds accumulates, loses definition and reorganizes itself. Dense sections give way to stretches in which the machinery seems distant, as though the recorder has been left running after the primary action moved elsewhere. These changes create depth without requiring studio polish. The listener is not positioned in front of a finished composition but inside a workspace, hearing the difference between immediate contact noise and signals arriving from another part of the room.
This room-bound quality separates Skrag from the spectacular harsh noise Brewer later made as Taint and Mania. There is no enormous stereo image or carefully sculpted bass. The sound is narrow, dirty and often starved of frequency range. Yet that limitation produces intimacy. Scraping noises feel close enough to touch, while background hum suggests walls surrounding the equipment. Even silence is never entirely empty; hiss and electrical residue remain active. The cassette does not transport the listener into an imaginary factory. It exposes a small real space being temporarily transformed through recording.
The final three pieces are significantly shorter, giving the end of the extended version a fragmented rhythm. After the fifth track’s prolonged excavation, these sections feel like leftover experiments rescued from the master rather than parts of an intentionally balanced album. That is not a weakness. Their inclusion clarifies Brewer’s early process. One piece compresses rough feedback and low-end movement into less than five minutes; the final pair offer quick, raw gestures that stop before they can become formal compositions. The tape ends without resolution because none was required. Skrag documents activity rather than presenting a grand statement.
Knowing Brewer’s later work inevitably affects how the cassette is heard. Taint would develop far more deliberate structures, confrontational vocals and obsessive themes involving sexual violence, criminal psychology and exploitation. Mania would push his sound toward thicker editing and highly controlled frequency pressure. Elements of both futures can be found here, particularly in the attraction to rough surfaces and the refusal of comforting musical order. Still, it would be a mistake to praise every accidental scrape simply because its maker eventually became important. Some portions drift, several sounds remain underdeveloped, and the extended duration exposes the limits of Brewer’s equipment and experience.
What makes Skrag worthwhile is not technical perfection but genuine curiosity. Brewer had not yet learned the conventions of power electronics well enough to reproduce them automatically. The recording therefore moves unpredictably between industrial drone, crude harsh noise, object manipulation and accidental musique concrète. It sounds like someone discovering that a tape recorder does more than preserve sound: it can compress space, magnify insignificant actions and turn equipment failure into composition. That discovery remains audible throughout the master.
The name Mysogyny suggests an early attempt to establish a hostile identity, but the audio carries little of the explicit thematic apparatus Brewer later attached to Taint. Without track titles or textual explanations, the provocation remains on the cassette shell while the recording concentrates on matter—metal, current, tape and air. This makes Skrag easier to approach as sound while also revealing how much Brewer’s later reputation depended upon combining sonic ability with morally abrasive subject matter. Here the ability comes first.
Skrag is consequently best understood as an origin point that remains rough enough to resist mythology. It contains dead stretches, awkward transitions and sounds that were probably more exciting to create than they are to hear. It also contains the first evidence of Brewer’s unusual patience with abrasive material. He listens to noise changing, allows recording defects to become structural and recognizes that crude sound can produce an atmosphere no expensive studio could manufacture. More than thirty years later, the surviving Nihilistic master does not sound like a polished lost classic. It sounds like a door being forced open by someone who had not yet decided what waited behind it.

Last Rape / Bizarre Uproar - 2008 - Collaboration

 

Filth And Violence – filth-10  286.85MB FLAC

The 2008 recording by Last Rape and Bizarre Uproar is usually cataloged under the appropriately plain title Collaboration. It is neither a conventional split nor an alternating sequence in which each project protects its own recognizable territory. Instead, it places the low, static pressure associated with Last Rape inside Bizarre Uproar’s dirtier field of junk metal, damaged electronics and physical agitation. The result feels less like two finished recordings joined together than one contaminated environment. Sounds cannot be confidently assigned to either participant because their identifying features have been pressed into the same thick, unstable mass.
That uncertainty is the release’s most valuable quality. Noise collaborations often promise interaction but deliver clearly separated layers: one artist supplies a wall, another adds vocals or metal, and the listener can still hear the seam between them. Here the seam is harder to locate. Low-frequency rumble, granular distortion, distant vocal movement and scraping metallic resonance continually pass through one another. When a particular source appears ready to dominate, it is buried, distorted or redirected. The music does not stage a polite exchange between Houston and Finland. It sounds like material mailed across the Atlantic, damaged through repeated processing and returned without its original ownership.
Last Rape was one of Richard Ramirez’s numerous harsh-noise projects. Initially used in the mid-1990s and revived a decade later, the name became increasingly associated with imagery and titles taken from Italian giallo films. Ramirez has described the project in those terms rather than as a direct statement about sexual violence. That distinction explains the release’s cinematic atmosphere, although it does not make the name neutral. By 2008, Last Rape was operating as Ramirez and Sean E. Matzus, another central figure in Houston noise through projects including In the Land of Archers and Black Leather Jesus.
Their sound emphasizes duration and enclosed pressure. Rather than creating suspense through melodies or obvious rhythmic development, Last Rape establishes a heavily distorted field and explores minute changes within it. A low-to-midrange roar remains present long enough for the ear to begin discovering movement that initially seemed absent. Static thickens, individual particles become sharper, and frequencies recede without producing a clear transition. This method contributed to the emerging harsh-noise-wall language, but Ramirez’s recordings frequently retained more atmospheric shadow than the most rigorously unchanging examples of that genre.
Bizarre Uproar brought a nearly opposite physical logic. Pasi Markkula had used the name since the early 1990s, developing from crude Finnish harsh noise into a particularly filthy hybrid of power electronics, junk metal and confrontational performance. The project’s late-2000s recordings were rarely static. Even when covered in a dense layer of distortion, they contained objects colliding, feedback changing direction, voices entering from uneven distances and mechanical loops that threatened to fall apart. Markkula’s noise had a bodily quality. One heard equipment being handled, metal being struck and physical force being applied rather than simply a signal continuing.
The collaboration succeeds because neither method completely absorbs the other. Last Rape supplies a foundation that resists dramatic movement, while Bizarre Uproar introduces irregular events that cannot permanently dislodge it. The opening stretch feels almost submerged. A coarse drone sits beneath a darker layer of static, with occasional sharp frequencies flashing across the surface. Metal is present, but initially distant enough to resemble part of the room rather than an instrument. The sound has depth: a heavy rear layer, an abrasive middle field and small fragments moving dangerously close to the listener.
As the recording develops, the metal becomes less atmospheric and more aggressive. Scrapes cut diagonally through the mass, producing brief openings before the wall closes around them. Some impacts seem to trigger changes in the electronics, as if the physical and amplified sources are pulling against one another. There is no steady beat, yet repetition occasionally produces a crude pulse. That pulse may last only several cycles before dissolving, but it gives the noise a momentary forward motion. The recording repeatedly approaches structure and then destroys the evidence.
Vocals occupy an ambiguous position. They never become a stable narrator explaining the concept, nor do they dominate in the familiar power-electronics manner. Shouts and lower vocal sounds emerge from within the distortion, often too damaged to carry complete language. This makes the human presence feel trapped rather than authoritative. A scream may appear to command the sound for a moment, only to be flattened into another frequency. The electronics do not accompany the voice; they attack its ability to remain human.
The production preserves a useful amount of murk. A cleaner mix could have revealed which artist contributed each source, but that information would diminish the music’s sense of contamination. The low end is broad without becoming a smooth modern bass wash. Midrange distortion carries the majority of the physical discomfort, while higher feedback supplies flashes of pain rather than one continuous whistle. The sound occasionally overloads into a nearly featureless block, but those sections make the return of metal, voice or internal pulsing more forceful.
This is not a harsh-noise wall in the strictest sense. Too many details shift, and Bizarre Uproar’s hands-on interference refuses complete stasis. Nor is it traditional power electronics, since there is no central declamation or ideological text organizing the noise. The recording operates between those forms. Last Rape’s sustained density provides confinement; Bizarre Uproar’s actions turn that confinement into a struggle. One project constructs the room, and the other appears to damage everything inside it.
The collaboration arrived during an unusually active period for both participants. Last Rape released a flood of small editions in 2007 and 2008, many using titles drawn from thrillers and giallo cinema. Bizarre Uproar was moving through the material later gathered around the Fifteen Years of Filth and Violence period, which Markkula described as among the project’s most physical recordings. The year also produced collaborations and splits with Gelsomina, The Cherry Point, Ride for Revenge and others. Rather than representing an isolated meeting, Collaboration captures an international noise network operating at full speed.
That context explains the recording’s lack of ceremony. There is no attempt to create a crossover record introducing either project to a general audience. The presentation assumes familiarity with handmade editions, anonymous tracks and concepts communicated as much through artwork as through audio. This can make the release appear slight when separated from its original form. Yet the music does not require rarity to become effective. Its tension comes from the incompatibility of its materials and the persistence with which those materials are forced together.
The Last Rape name inevitably shapes the encounter before any sound begins. Ramirez’s explanation that the project draws upon giallo cinema is relevant: black gloves, obscured identities, stalking, sexualized murder and threatening urban space are recurring elements of that film tradition. The recording’s dark, partially concealed movement suits those references more effectively than literal samples would. It creates the sensation of action occurring beyond clear sight. Noise becomes an obstructed camera, revealing texture and motion while withholding the event itself.
Bizarre Uproar’s own history of sexual violence, humiliation and domination as artistic themes makes the pairing conceptually obvious but ethically unstable. Neither project supplies a clear argument about its imagery. The listener receives fascination, disgust and ambiguity without instructions for separating them. As with much transgressive noise, the danger is that reference to exploitation becomes another form of exploitation, particularly when actual suffering is reduced to packaging language. The recording is strongest when its sound carries the psychological weight independently—when pressure, obstruction and bodily struggle are audible without needing a provocative project name to manufacture seriousness.
Its weaker passages occur when density becomes inertia. There are sections in which the midrange flattens, internal contrast decreases and the collaboration briefly resembles countless other overloaded noise recordings. The lack of major structural turns is intentional, but intention does not automatically sustain attention. What rescues these passages is the eventual return of physical detail: a metal edge catching against the static, a vocal shape surfacing or the lower layer beginning to oscillate. Small changes matter because the music has trained the listener to expect so little obvious movement.
The ending offers no clean resolution. The accumulated field does not arrive at a triumphant final blast or collapse into explanatory silence. It simply reaches the point at which continued pressure would no longer alter the experience. This refusal of climax suits both projects. Last Rape’s noise suggests a condition that could continue beyond the recording, while Bizarre Uproar rejects the theatrical satisfaction of a carefully prepared finish. The sound stops, but it does not feel completed.
Collaboration is ultimately a meeting of two different concepts of confinement. Ramirez and Matzus work through extended, gradually changing density; Markkula works through material damage, bodily intervention and filthy electronic motion. Their combined recording is less monumental than corrosive. It does not stand in front of the listener as a solid wall. It surrounds, scrapes and repeatedly seals its own openings. The release remains effective because it denies easy separation—between artists, sources, static and action, cinematic fantasy and genuine ugliness. Everything has been pushed into the same airless enclosure, and no participant emerges from it clean.

1928 Youre Darn Tootin

1928 - YOU'RE DARN TOOTIN'

You’re Darn Tootin’ begins with music already collapsing under the weight of two men who cannot stop interfering with it. Stan Laurel sits with a clarinet, Oliver Hardy wrestles with a French horn, and the surrounding orchestra tries to continue as though these two unstable elements can somehow be absorbed into the arrangement. They cannot. Music stands shift, sheet music becomes contested territory, instruments refuse to behave, and the conductor’s attempts at order only make the accumulating disorder more visible. The joke is not simply that Stan and Ollie are bad musicians. They belong to an ensemble that depends upon timing, discipline, attention, and cooperation, while their entire comic existence is based on misunderstanding those requirements.
Released in 1928, near the end of Laurel and Hardy’s silent period, You’re Darn Tootin’ is a compact demonstration of how their comedy could expand from the smallest irritation into collective destruction. The film was directed by Edgar Kennedy, produced by Hal Roach, and written by H. M. Walker, with Floyd Jackman handling the cinematography. Its story takes only about twenty minutes to move from an orchestra performance to unemployment, eviction, street busking, a flattened musical instrument, and finally a public brawl in which kicking a man’s shin leads naturally to tearing off his trousers.
The opening orchestra sequence establishes the method. Stan and Ollie are not aggressive saboteurs. They are trying to participate, which makes the damage more effective. Stan’s clarinet seems less like an instrument than a complicated object he has recently discovered. Ollie approaches the horn with greater dignity, but dignity in a Laurel and Hardy film usually exists to be punctured. Hardy’s confidence gives each indignity somewhere to land. A foot crushes his hand, an object refuses his authority, or Stan’s blank response leaves him suspended between anger and disbelief. He then turns toward the camera, looking for recognition from an audience that understands his suffering better than his partner ever will.
Laurel’s face operates differently. His confusion often appears total, but it is never empty. He studies broken objects and angry people with the concentration of someone confronting an entirely new law of nature. His mistakes have a delayed rhythm. An action occurs, Stan considers it, and only afterward does its disastrous meaning become visible. Hardy reacts as though the world has violated a contract. Laurel reacts as though no contract could ever have been understood in the first place.
Once the pair are fired, the film removes the formal structure of the orchestra and sends them into the street. This should create freedom, but it only exposes how little protection the institution had been providing. They lose their lodging after the landlady learns that they are unemployed, then attempt to earn money as street musicians. The progression is brutally simple: work disappears, housing follows, and performance becomes survival. The comedy never settles into social realism, but its machinery depends upon economic precarity. Their instruments are no longer merely props or tools of artistic expression. They are the last objects standing between the men and complete destitution, which naturally means those instruments must be mishandled, damaged, and destroyed.
The famous flattened-horn gag is beautifully direct. An instrument designed around curves, air, and resonance is reduced to a thin metallic shape by a steamroller. When Ollie attempts to play it, the intertitle delivers the obvious verdict: it is flat. The gag works because the physical destruction arrives first and the verbal joke follows as a small ceremonial stamp. Silent comedy was never entirely silent. It relied on intertitles, live musical accompaniment, audience noise, and the imagined sounds created by visible impact. You’re Darn Tootin’ constantly invites the mind to manufacture noise: sour notes, snapping stands, footsteps, kicks, crushed metal, and the commotion of bodies turning against one another.
The final street fight abandons almost every remaining pretense of narrative development. Stan and Ollie quarrel, shin-kicking begins, retaliation follows, and passing strangers become infected by the same behavior. Each participant repeats the structure: injury, outrage, revenge, escalation. Soon trousers are being ripped away as though public humiliation were the inevitable conclusion of minor physical annoyance. The gag spreads socially. One person’s ridiculous response teaches the next person how to behave, until the street becomes a temporary civilization governed by kicks and missing pants.
This sequence reveals one of Laurel and Hardy’s most durable ideas: destruction can function as a form of communication. Their characters rarely resolve disagreements through explanation. Instead, an object is broken, a hat is crushed, a shin is kicked, or a carefully maintained appearance is dismantled. The actions become increasingly unreasonable, but the emotional chain remains perfectly clear. Every escalation is an answer to the previous insult.
There is also pleasure in seeing respectable surfaces stripped away. The orchestra begins with formal clothing, organized seating, written music, and a conductor attempting control. By the conclusion, adult men are fighting in the street without trousers. The film travels from public culture to public exposure. Order is not defeated by a grand rebellion. It is worried apart by incompetence, irritation, pride, and repetition.
The short’s photography remains functional and generous. Shots are wide enough for the body mechanics to register, while closer framings preserve Hardy’s offended glances and Laurel’s slow realizations. The camera does not frantically manufacture energy. It allows actions to develop inside the frame, giving viewers enough time to anticipate the collision before it occurs. That anticipation is central to slapstick. The audience sees the vulnerable hand, unstable object, approaching vehicle, or offended pedestrian and understands the danger before the characters do.
Nearly a century later, You’re Darn Tootin’ remains recognizable because its comedy is built from material relationships rather than topical references. Musical instruments are difficult. Employment is fragile. Rent is due. Partners become irritating. Small injuries provoke disproportionate responses. Crowds imitate bad behavior. Clothing offers only temporary protection from humiliation. The film reduces these realities to a chain of clean visual actions and then keeps tightening the chain until everything snaps.
Laurel and Hardy would go on to make more elaborate and emotionally developed films, particularly after sound gave their voices another dimension. Yet this silent short already contains the essential architecture of their partnership. Ollie carries the fantasy of competence. Stan punctures it without necessarily understanding that he has done so. Ollie blames Stan, Stan suffers the blame, and both remain inseparable from the catastrophe they create together.
You’re Darn Tootin’ does not need a complicated plot because escalation is its plot. It begins with two musicians failing to follow a conductor and ends with an entire street following Laurel and Hardy into madness. The music stops, but the rhythm continues through impacts, reactions, repetitions, and reversals. By the time the trousers start coming off, the orchestra has simply changed instruments. Bodies have replaced horns and clarinets, and disorder has become the only tune everyone knows how to play.

Cabaret Voltaire - 2020 - Shadow of Fear

 

Mute – CABS30CD  391.70MB FLAC The cover of Shadow of Fear looks less designed than chemically exposed. Black, bruised blue, and scorched white divide the surface into unstable zones, with hard streaks crossing what might be concrete, machinery, a damaged photograph, or the remains of an image pushed through too many generations of reproduction. Nothing resolves into a comfortable object. The picture appears caught between architecture and interference, as though a surveillance frame has been enlarged until the information becomes texture. “CABARET VOLTAIRE” sits in thin white lettering above the title, while “SHADOW OF FEAR” burns through in orange-red. The typography is small relative to the image, allowing the darkness to remain the dominant fact. On the CD edition, the same image continues across the disc and folding package, turning the object into a compact black-and-blue transmission rather than a nostalgic return announcement. Shadow of Fear arrived in November 2020 as the first Cabaret Voltaire studio album since The Conversation in 1994 and the first made with Richard H. Kirk as the sole member. Kirk had already revived the name for live performance at Berlin Atonal in 2014, but he made the terms of that return unusually strict: no reunion, no old material, and no attempt to recreate a remembered version of the group. The point was not to polish the museum glass around Cabaret Voltaire. It was to reactivate the method. That distinction is audible immediately. Shadow of Fear carries the group’s identifying materials—repetitive rhythm, treated voices, dub space, electronic abrasion, funk reduced to nervous motion—but avoids arranging them as heritage markers. The album does not announce itself with a quotation from the past. It begins inside a system already running. Beats pulse beneath clipped vocal fragments, synthetic tones hover at the edge of stability, and small noises enter as warnings rather than decoration. Kirk’s production creates depth without cleanliness. Sounds seem positioned in separate chambers, some sharply illuminated and others muffled behind walls. The record’s machinery rarely moves with the frictionless precision associated with contemporary electronic production. Its loops drag slightly, percussion lands with awkward physical weight, and recurring figures feel worked rather than automatically generated. Kirk reportedly considered modernizing his studio setup, but after computer trouble returned to a comparatively restricted collection of older equipment. That limitation became productive. Instead of endless digital possibility, the album works through pressure, repetition, and imaginative misuse of a smaller apparatus. This does not make Shadow of Fear an exercise in vintage electronics. The sounds may be rough-edged, but their organization belongs to the present. House and techno rhythms appear without offering uncomplicated release. Dub techniques open space, but the empty areas feel monitored. Acidic lines squirm through the mix while voices arrive as partial instructions, testimony, propaganda, or intercepted speech. The album remains danceable, although dancing inside it can feel like moving through an emergency broadcast. Kirk completed the record just as the first wave of COVID-era disruption began. He emphasized that its vocal material and central ideas were already in place before the pandemic transformed public life, yet the title immediately seemed synchronized with the moment. That accidental timing gave the album an eerie surface relevance, but its unease is broader than one historical event. Cabaret Voltaire had always worked with paranoia, media saturation, institutional control, manipulated language, and the psychological pressure of technology. By 2020, the surrounding world had simply become even more compatible with that vocabulary. The sampled voices are crucial because they prevent the instrumental tracks from becoming sealed environments. Human presence keeps breaking through, but it arrives damaged, repeated, displaced, or stripped of context. A phrase may sound authoritative on its first appearance and ridiculous by its fifth. Another fragment becomes threatening simply because the source cannot be identified. This treatment of speech connects Shadow of Fear to Cabaret Voltaire’s early tape experiments without duplicating their original form. Information remains material. Words are cut loose from explanation and made to operate as rhythm, atmosphere, and coercion. The album’s longer structures allow small changes to acquire disproportionate importance. A percussion pattern can continue until a new tone alters the apparent dimensions of the room. A bass figure that initially seems functional becomes oppressive through repetition. Effects gather around the edges, then disappear before they can be fully located. Rather than building toward obvious peaks, several pieces establish unstable conditions and remain inside them. The pleasure comes from hearing those conditions mutate. There is funk here, but it has been deprived of social ease. Rhythms lock together while other elements resist them. There is dub, but its spaciousness resembles an abandoned industrial site more than a warm studio haze. There is techno, but its propulsion is interrupted by grit, voices, and irregular details. There are traces of kosmische drift, though the horizon remains blocked by urban material. Kirk moves among these forms without treating genre as a set of separate rooms. Everything leaks. That leakage gives the record continuity. Shadow of Fear contains eight substantial pieces across nearly an hour, but it feels less like a sequence of individual statements than an extended passage through related machinery. Certain sections are heavier and more percussive; others spread outward into drone, echo, and suspended electronic tone. The final effect is not monotony but environmental coherence. The listener is kept inside one territory while the architecture changes. The closing material loosens some of the album’s pressure without providing resolution. Groove becomes more visible, and recognizable human phrasing pushes closer to the foreground, yet the central question remains unanswered. The record repeatedly gestures toward systems of power and knowledge without translating them into a fixed political program. Kirk preferred surreal association to direct explanation. Meaning accumulates through collision: a title, a voice, a rhythm, an image, and the listener’s awareness of the world outside the speakers. Shadow of Fear also gains retrospective weight from Kirk’s death in September 2021. It became part of a final cluster of Cabaret Voltaire releases that included the Shadow of Funk EP and the long-form works Dekadrone and BN9Drone. Together they documented a late phase that was not interested in summary. Kirk did not spend his final period arranging a victory lap through the catalogue. He continued opening new corridors inside the name. That refusal of nostalgia is the album’s strongest claim. Cabaret Voltaire’s history is present, but it functions as an active technique rather than a display of old signatures. The group’s original importance came partly from treating recording equipment, television speech, industrial noise, rhythm, and paranoia as materials that could be reorganized before culture had settled on names for the result. Shadow of Fear preserves that impulse by refusing to behave like a reunion album. The cover’s obscured structure becomes increasingly accurate as the record unfolds. Light crosses the image, but it does not clarify it. Surfaces appear only to break apart again. The music behaves similarly, exposing fragments of beat, voice, and atmosphere without revealing one stable picture behind them. Shadow of Fear is not the sound of Cabaret Voltaire returning from absence. It is the sound of Richard H. Kirk discovering that the machinery had never stopped running.