Stanislav Tolkachev - 2009 - Takecare CDr

 

~taqueOT – # tot 001a  26.31MB FLAC

Takecare occupies barely five minutes, yet it feels less like a minor single than a sealed philosophical capsule from the early Stanislav Tolkachev universe. The physical edition is almost aggressively small: a business-card CDr placed inside a miniature handmade book, its brown cardboard cover interrupted only by a black cloth spine and the vertically embossed words STANISLAV TOLKACHEV TAKECARE. Nothing on the exterior resembles conventional techno packaging. There is no club photograph, futurist diagram, dramatic typography or promise of dance-floor effectiveness. The object resembles a private notebook, an archival file or a volume removed from a library whose other books have disappeared. The music inside is equally concentrated. One short piece must contain the entire release, with no B-side, remix or supporting track available to explain what it means.

The title initially sounds gentle. “Take care” can be a farewell, an expression of affection offered when two people separate. It can also be an instruction issued before danger: be careful, remain alert, protect yourself. Written as one word, Takecare becomes less conversational and more like the name of a procedure, institution or condition. Care has been converted from an intimate human action into a compact label. Tolkachev’s music repeatedly lives inside this ambiguity, where concern and warning occupy the same phrase. Later titles such as Why Are You So Frightened, Sometimes Everything Is Wrong, When You Are Not at Home, Be Careful and Nobody Dies and There Is No Cure would continue treating ordinary sentences as openings into anxiety. Takecare is an early, miniature version of that emotional language.

The piece begins with a spoken passage from Серебряные головы, or Silver Heads, an intellectually severe Russian-language film whose scientific and existential atmosphere provides more than decorative cinematic mystery. Tolkachev does not use speech merely to make the track sound ominous before the beat arrives. The voice places human thought inside a machine composition, establishing a tension between ideas that require language and sensations that exceed it. Once spoken words enter recorded music, they become rhythmic and textural objects even for listeners who cannot understand them. Cadence, breath, age, recording quality and emotional pressure communicate alongside literal meaning. The sample carries the density of another era and another medium, like a strip of celluloid inserted into an electronic circuit.

This use of Soviet and post-Soviet film material would recur in Tolkachev’s work, but here it feels especially intimate because the release provides no broader album around it. The speaker is not one voice among many. She stands at the threshold of the only composition, framing everything that follows. Her presence makes the track resemble an answer to a question the listener has only partially heard. The electronics do not translate the speech. They continue thinking by other means.

Tolkachev’s early techno was already distinguished by its refusal to behave like a dependable functional tool. He understood four-on-the-floor rhythm, Detroit repetition and the architecture of the club, but his tracks often seemed to approach that architecture from a slightly displaced angle. Patterns leaned against one another instead of fitting perfectly. Tonal figures could feel melancholy, anxious or strangely illuminated without settling into ordinary melody. Percussive details operated as independent thoughts rather than as decoration around a kick drum. Even when the pulse remained stable, the surrounding information made stability feel provisional.

Takecare condenses that method until every sound appears to carry more responsibility than its size should allow. Five minutes leave little room for the gradual scenic construction found in longer techno records, yet Tolkachev does not respond by making the track blunt or immediately demonstrative. The spoken opening creates reflection before propulsion. Electronic material then enters not as a clean break from language but as an extension of its unresolved mood. The composition feels like thought becoming circuitry.

His music has often been called psychedelic, though not because it reproduces the decorative language of psychedelic rock. Tolkachev’s psychedelia lies in unstable perception. A repeating figure can seem to change despite remaining structurally similar. One sound may occupy several emotional roles at once: alarm, melody, machinery and memory. Rhythmic elements can make the body move while their tonal surroundings make the mind question where that movement is leading. Takecare creates this effect in compressed form. It does not take the listener on a long journey outward. It changes the dimensions of one small room.

The business-card format strengthens that contradiction. A business card normally reduces a person to usable information: name, occupation, telephone number, address. It exists to make future contact efficient. This disc occupies roughly the same physical dimensions but carries something impractical and psychologically ambiguous. Instead of explaining who Stanislav Tolkachev is, it opens a five-minute uncertainty. The medium promises identification; the music resists it.

There is also a wonderful disproportion between the object’s physical smallness and the historical size Tolkachev’s music would later acquire. In 2009 he was already an experienced producer, but he had not yet become the internationally recognized figure associated with Semantica, M_Rec, MORD, Token, Modularz and major European techno institutions. Much of his catalog circulated digitally or through obscure labels, with no suggestion that listeners should rank one track according to the prestige of its publisher. Takecare appeared through a tiny Ukrainian operation as a numbered handmade artifact, almost hidden at the edge of an already underground discography.

That context suits Tolkachev because his work has never sounded designed around career hierarchy. The same attention can appear on an obscure file, limited CDr or established vinyl label. His music does not announce that certain ideas have been reserved for important releases. Every piece may contain an essential fragment of the larger language. Takecare demonstrates this beautifully. Its brevity and scarcity do not make it a sketch awaiting completion elsewhere. It is a complete small form.

The cover’s resemblance to a handmade book also places the recording beside Tolkachev’s parallel life as a photographer and visual artist. He began working seriously with film photography in the early 2000s, using medium-format cameras, darkroom processes and later alternative printing techniques. Those practices depend upon patience, physical materials and the acceptance that reproduction will never be entirely neutral. Paper, chemistry, exposure and handling alter the image. Takecare’s packaging belongs to the same world of tactile decisions. The uneven warmth of cardboard and the pressure of embossed lettering offer information that a digital thumbnail cannot fully carry.

This relationship between sound and photography helps clarify Tolkachev’s techno. His tracks often resemble images developed in a darkroom rather than structures assembled from perfectly clean digital components. Shapes emerge through grain. Details remain partially concealed. Contrast becomes expressive, and darkness contains information rather than simple absence. Takecare is a tiny sonic print whose spoken source and electronic body appear to have been exposed together, one image bleeding into the other.

The label name ~taqueOT adds another layer of coded obscurity. Its styling looks like damaged text, an unfamiliar technical command or a word retrieved from corrupted storage. The catalog number # tot 001a identifies Takecare as an opening gesture, but the “a” makes even the first item appear to have an alternate or companion state. The release feels cataloged before the listener understands what institution is doing the cataloging. This is administration transformed into private art.

The title’s idea of care becomes more interesting when applied to preservation. A five-minute track could easily have disappeared with an obsolete website, failed drive or lost box of tiny CDrs. To take care of the music means maintaining the object, transferring its contents and retaining enough information that the recording does not become an anonymous file. The FLAC archive preserves the audio, while photographs preserve the handmade exterior. Neither replaces the physical disc, but together they keep the edition from collapsing into a line in a discography.

Care also describes the attention required by the piece itself. Techno is frequently evaluated according to immediate utility: how effectively a track enters a mix, changes a dance floor or sustains momentum. Takecare asks for another type of use. The spoken passage slows the listener’s approach, and the limited duration prevents the electronic section from becoming a long functional environment. The track is closer to a concentrated encounter than a tool. It arrives, changes the air and ends before familiarity can neutralize it.

This does not make it anti-club music. Tolkachev’s deepest strength is his ability to preserve bodily logic while allowing intellectual and emotional instability to remain active. Rhythm and reflection do not have to be opposing categories. Repetition can move the body while creating enough internal space for the mind to drift toward questions the track never answers. The sample from Silver Heads does not make the composition “serious,” as though pure electronic sound would otherwise lack thought. It reveals the thought already hidden within repetition.

Tolkachev has described his influences as extending from Detroit and Birmingham techno into Cage, Riley, Reich, Subotnick and Raymond Scott. Takecare makes sense within that broad lineage. Detroit contributes the belief that machine music can carry human feeling without imitating traditional performance. Minimalism contributes the understanding that repetition changes perception. Experimental electronics contributes the willingness to let timbre, instability and process become subjects in themselves. Film contributes another consciousness, a recorded human presence entering from outside the track’s immediate time.

Yet Takecare never sounds like a résumé of influences. It is too small, personal and peculiar for that. Its significance lies in how naturally these histories have already become part of Tolkachev’s thinking. He does not place avant-garde procedure on top of techno to make it academically respectable. Nor does he use Detroit as a set of nostalgic surface markers. The forms have been absorbed until they behave like instincts.

In 2009, the same ~taqueOT label also issued Tolkachev’s experimental Grain material, and the two releases reveal a moment when his catalog could move between club structure, beatless study and handcrafted physical presentation without treating those activities as separate careers. A melodic idea from Grain would later return within When You Are Not at Home, demonstrating that his archive is not a line of abandoned experiments but a reservoir whose elements may reappear years afterward. Takecare belongs to that reservoir even if its exact materials were not recycled. It establishes the habit of placing spoken philosophical material beside electronic composition, a relationship that would remain important in later work.

The recording’s single-track form also removes the listener’s usual ability to compare. There is no second piece demonstrating range, no weaker track making the primary one appear stronger, and no sequence through which a broader concept becomes obvious. Takecare must stand alone, like one photograph removed from a larger series. The absence of context produces intensity. We look longer because there is nowhere else to move.

That isolation is central to the emotional character of much Tolkachev music. His work can fill a large club, yet it frequently feels as though it originates from one person alone with machines, images and thoughts that cannot be explained directly. The dance floor receives the signal collectively, but its emotional content remains private. Takecare preserves that paradox in its purest form: a tiny numbered object designed to circulate among strangers, carrying a voice from a film into an electronic composition made by an artist in Dnipro, then continuing outward through collectors and digital archives.

The title finally begins to sound less like a farewell than an instruction attached to the object itself. Take care of this. Take care while entering it. Take care because thought, memory and machinery are more fragile than their repetition suggests. The phrase offers concern while acknowledging danger.

Five minutes later, the small disc has finished. The cardboard book can be closed, the black cloth spine returned to a shelf, and the spoken voice sent back into silence. Nothing monumental has been declared. Yet an entire artistic philosophy is present in miniature: electronic music as thought, repetition as unstable memory, packaging as physical evidence, obscurity as freedom, and care as the labor that allows a fragile signal to survive.

Rehberg & Bauer - 2001 - Passt

Touch – TO:45  260.74MB FLAC

 Passt begins with a man screaming an introduction as though Peter Rehberg and Ramon Bauer are about to descend upon an arena with dancers, brass sections and a catalogue of beloved hits. The voice is absurdly overheated, a carnival barker trying to inflate two seated laptop performers into a funk-soul spectacular. Then the machines answer with tiny clicks, clipped signals and microscopic digital debris. The mismatch is one of the album’s governing jokes. Rehberg and Bauer were working at a moment when the laptop had begun acquiring the status once held by the electric guitar, yet its stage language remained hilariously poor. A guitarist could leap, grimace and raise an instrument above his head. Two people staring into computers offered almost no visible proof that anything was occurring. Passt turns that apparent inadequacy into theater. The introduction promises spectacle, and the duo responds by making the spectacle happen inside the signal.

This was the third and final installment in Rehberg and Bauer’s Touch trilogy after Faßt and ballt. The earlier records had helped establish an approach built from digital errors, software malfunctions, clipped data, feedback and sounds that appeared to exist because a computer had failed to reproduce audio cleanly. By 2001, however, that once-disruptive vocabulary was already becoming a recognized genre. Glitch had acquired techniques, audiences and expectations. Errors could now be produced on command, arranged decoratively and sold as a new kind of surface elegance. Passt arrives at the exact point when yesterday’s malfunction is becoming today’s preset. Its aggression comes partly from the duo’s refusal to remain safely identified with the movement they had helped create.

The title can be translated loosely as “fits,” “suits,” or “works,” which makes it an elegant piece of Viennese deadpan. Almost nothing here fits comfortably. The record moves between digital pinpricks, low-frequency convulsions, aquatic pops, metallic fragmentation, near-rhythms and full eruptions whose density seems capable of damaging the system producing them. Yet the materials fit in another sense because Rehberg and Bauer have learned how to organize incompatibility. Their work does not sound like random errors left unattended. Every burst, silence and sudden change of scale has been edited into an unusually taut thirty-three-minute progression. Passt refuses a stable genre while demonstrating that refusal itself can possess exact form.

The source material came from three Australian performances: the What Is Music? presentation at Sydney’s Big Day Out, a Melbourne appearance at Revolver, and another Sydney concert at the Palladium. This setting matters. Rehberg and Bauer’s computer improvisation did not develop solely inside a protected electroacoustic studio or a small European art space whose audience already knew how to behave. One performance occurred within the immense cultural machinery of a summer rock festival. Somewhere nearby were crowds expecting bands, songs, drums, amplifiers and visible physical labor. The duo’s digital activity entered that environment as an alien proposition. The question “What Is Music?” was not academic decoration. Listeners could hear the computers producing pressure, rhythm and excitement while still wondering whether what they were witnessing qualified as performance at all.

Passt does not preserve those concerts as untouched documents. Most of the material was cut, rearranged and transformed in Vienna between March 2000 and April 2001. Live improvisation became raw matter for another composition performed retrospectively through editing. The audience heard one event; the CD creates another. This prevents the album from fitting neatly into either live documentation or studio construction. It contains rooms, crowds and the unpredictable force of public performance, but those elements have passed through a year of reconsideration. Rehberg and Bauer respond to their former selves after the original urgency has ended, cutting open decisions that had once been irreversible.

“Finga” is divided into three indexed sections, beginning with the emcee’s delirious announcement before moving through small electronic ticks and increasingly violent digital formations. The music initially seems almost underpowered beside the introduction, but this imbalance is strategic. Tiny sounds establish a low threshold, teaching the listener to lean inward before the first major eruption. Minimal bleeps gather into a heavy repeating motion that resembles an engine, an outboard motor or artillery heard through damaged communications equipment. Rhythm does not arrive through a recognizable drum machine. It condenses from interference until the noise begins moving with collective purpose.

That transformation captures the duo’s connection to techno without making Passt a techno record. Mego emerged partly from Vienna’s dance-music culture, and Rehberg and Bauer never treated rhythm as an enemy of experimentation. Their pulses retain an awareness of the club even when they are too unstable, abrasive or asymmetrical to serve a conventional dance floor. The body keeps receiving invitations that the music immediately complicates. A bass throb begins establishing a groove, then an interruption removes the ground beneath it. A rapid loop suggests propulsion before being shredded into unrelated fragments. Dance music’s promise of reliable recurrence becomes a practical joke conducted at high volume.

“Sunday” is comparatively spacious, but its space never feels restful. Soft pulses and wet electronic clicks appear within a field whose emptiness makes every detail strangely exposed. The title suggests leisure, closure or the quiet day after public excess, yet the duo does not provide recovery. Their quieter sounds behave like equipment continuing to operate after workers have left the building. Small signals communicate with nobody. Low bass arrives as pressure without a visible source. The track is gentler only according to volume; psychologically it may be the album’s most isolated section.

Rehberg and Bauer understood that digital noise could become monotonous if every moment insisted upon destruction. Passt gains force by continually changing the listener’s threshold. After a dense passage, a nearly empty space makes a click feel enormous. After several minutes of restraint, a rough burst seems to tear a physical hole through the recording. The album’s brevity intensifies this dynamic. Nothing is allowed to remain long enough to become a comfortable signature. Even recognizable Rehberg and Bauer textures are subjected to interruption before they can harden into style.

“Nixnull” gives the album its most explicit language of absence. “Nix” and “null” both suggest nothing, zero, cancellation or data without content. Yet the piece is not silent. It reveals how crowded technological nothingness can be. Every supposedly empty channel carries hiss, residual current, compression, memory and electrical instability. Digital silence is a numerical instruction, not the absence of machinery. Rehberg and Bauer listen beneath that instruction and recover the activity that technical systems are designed to conceal.

This interest in residue connects Passt to the larger Mego philosophy. Computers were not neutral containers waiting to reproduce musical ideas transparently. They were instruments with particular failures, processing artifacts and hidden behaviors. Software could stutter, overload or return an unintended value; those events were not necessarily obstacles between composer and desired result. They might be the most revealing moments the system produced. The radical step was not simply using mistakes as sound. It was abandoning the assumption that the musician already knew which outcomes deserved to be called correct.

By the time Passt appeared, imitation had complicated that discovery. Once listeners recognized the sound of digital failure, producers could manufacture the sign of malfunction without allowing anything genuinely unpredictable to occur. Glitch risked becoming a polished image of technical danger, the sonic equivalent of a perfectly designed crack printed onto a new surface. Passt answers by increasing its physical force and narrative volatility. The duo do not linger over each exquisite error like collectors displaying rare insects. They weaponize the entire collection and keep it moving.

“Revolver” occupies more than half the record, divided into seven CD indices but derived from a continuous live performance. The title refers to the Melbourne venue, yet it also describes the music’s rotating mechanism. Fragments return, chambers align, pressure accumulates and the whole apparatus appears to fire in repeated cycles. Unlike the heavily reconstructed earlier movements, “Revolver” retains the danger of an event developing before an audience with no later opportunity to redirect its immediate course.

The section begins within recognizably glitch-derived terrain, but it keeps climbing through levels of density until those genre coordinates become useless. Rapid loops form temporary structures; static snaps across the stereo field; low pulses push from underneath while higher frequencies scatter like metal filings. The improvisation’s achievement lies not merely in becoming louder. Each increase in intensity alters the internal proportions. What had sounded like a central rhythm becomes one minor component inside a larger mechanical swarm.

Halfway through, a speed-metal guitar figure enters and pans excitedly across the field. Its arrival is both ridiculous and completely convincing. The laptop musicians suddenly summon the most exaggerated emblem of physical rock performance, but the guitar is no longer securely attached to a guitarist, band or song. It has become another unruly data object. Rehberg and Bauer do not use metal as ironic decoration placed above refined computer music. The riff meets electronics at the shared point where repetition, distortion and excess become bodily pleasure.

This moment completes the joke begun by the emcee. Passt opened with the duo being introduced as entertainers of impossible magnitude. “Revolver” eventually produces its own mutated arena-rock climax, but the guitar has been captured inside a system that refuses stable performance identity. The laptop has swallowed the guitar rather than replacing it. Digital abstraction and physical rock theater discover that they were never as separate as their audiences imagined.

The cover photograph by Jon Wozencroft shows clusters of pale blue thorned forms, enlarged until they hover between botanical detail, microscopic organisms and defensive machinery. Their repeated structures resemble the album’s sound: many small points forming larger rounded bodies, beautiful at a distance and hazardous upon contact. The cold blue field is interrupted by the title in orange-red, a small heat source inside a landscape of spikes. Even the barcode remains visible at the upper edge, reminding us that this alien object is also a standardized commercial product designed to pass through scanners without difficulty.

Touch’s presentation gives Passt a visual stillness almost completely absent from the audio. The image does not illustrate speed, violence or computers. It provides a surface upon which those associations can accumulate slowly. The thorn clusters also suggest a problem of scale central to the record. Is the listener looking at one large organism or hundreds of tiny structures? Are we hearing one composition or thirteen tracks, three concerts or four movements, live improvisation or studio construction? Every answer remains simultaneously useful and incomplete.

Passt succeeds because it understands that electronic innovation does not survive by protecting a once-new sound from contamination. It survives by placing that sound under renewed pressure. Rehberg and Bauer could have continued refining elegant digital mistakes and remained exemplary figures within glitch. Instead, they made an album that mocks its own stage presentation, subjects live material to aggressive reconstruction, invites rhythm to form and collapse, and finally allows a metal guitar to charge through the circuitry like an animal escaping its cage.

The record is only thirty-three minutes long, but it feels complete because every section performs a necessary structural task. “Finga” inflates and punctures spectacle. “Sunday” reveals the unease inside reduced activity. “Nixnull” discovers matter inside supposed nothingness. “Revolver” returns the whole method to live risk and drives it toward overload. The trilogy closes not by perfecting the language Faßt helped establish, but by showing how quickly perfection would turn that language into another prison.

More than two decades later, the laptop is so ordinary that its former novelty can be difficult to reconstruct. Computers now mediate nearly every phase of music, from composition and performance to mastering, distribution and listening. Passt preserves the point when bringing one onstage could still destabilize the audience’s understanding of musical labor. Yet the album does not survive merely as a historical demonstration of early software sound. Its editing, pacing, humor and brute physicality remain effective after the technology has lost its futuristic aura.

The machines no longer seem exotic, but the decisions do. Rehberg and Bauer keep refusing the easiest identity available to them, making computer music that remembers techno, noise, metal, comedy and the public awkwardness of performance without settling permanently into any one. Passt fits because it does not belong. It closes a trilogy by leaving the circuitry open, still sparking, still vulnerable to whatever incompatible material might enter next.

White Gimp Mask - 2011 - Take Her To The Woods CDr

Toxic Industries – Xi024  213.76MB FLAC

 
 Take Her to the Woods is built around a sentence that sounds incomplete because its missing information is the source of its threat. Who is giving the instruction? Who is expected to obey? Who is “her,” and does she know where she is being taken? The title does not describe an event after it has happened. It issues a command before the destination has been reached, trapping the listener inside the interval between intention and action. White Gimp Mask leaves every identity unstated, then fills that absence with nearly an hour of harsh noise. The three tracks have no individual titles because the command already governs the entire recording. Everything occurs after the order has been given.

The woods carry several contradictory meanings. They are refuge from civilization, childhood adventure, romantic privacy, hunting ground, burial place and terrain where witnesses disappear. Cities establish ownership through addresses, lighting, roads and visible boundaries. A forest weakens those systems. Paths divide, landmarks repeat and sound travels without revealing its source. To take somebody into the woods may be protective, intimate or predatory, but White Gimp Mask’s project name and the record’s oppressive sound make the harmless interpretations difficult to sustain. The phrase transforms nature into an accomplice whose leaves, soil and distance can absorb evidence.

The cover understands this without showing a victim, weapon or masked figure. Most of the image is occupied by a chain-link fence standing before a stained pale wall, a landscape of regulation, exclusion and managed visibility. An inset photograph of dense woodland appears at the right like a window, monitor or doorway inserted into the industrial surface. A thick tree trunk blocks much of the foreground, allowing only a narrow glimpse of vegetation beyond it. The forest is present, but access is obstructed. The viewer remains outside, looking through multiple layers: fence, frame, tree and foliage.

This is more unsettling than explicit crime imagery would have been. A graphic photograph could tell us what occurred and convert horror into a completed spectacle. The cover supplies only infrastructure and destination. It resembles a location remembered by somebody who knows why it matters but refuses to explain. The title becomes the only narrative connecting the sterile enclosure to the woods. The listener must construct the journey.

White Gimp Mask is an equally economical project name. A gimp mask belongs to fetish performance, concealment and controlled restriction. It removes the face, obscures ordinary identity and may limit speech or sight. Within consensual sexual practice, the mask can be part of jointly arranged role-play whose meaning depends upon trust and negotiated boundaries. Detached from those conditions, it becomes an image of anonymity, captivity and dehumanization. The word “white” gives the mask a clinical or ghostly quality, reversing the familiar black leather image while suggesting blankness: a face covered not by darkness but by an empty surface.

The name therefore establishes a figure who can be submissive, threatening or both. A masked person might have surrendered identity willingly, or might be using concealed identity to act without accountability. White Gimp Mask’s music preserves that uncertainty. There is no vocalist clearly occupying the role of aggressor or victim, no narrative sample assigning moral positions and no visible performer whose gestures explain the electronics. The mask is sonic. Distortion removes facial detail from every sound.

Robert Newsome’s work frequently sits between harsh noise wall and more actively changing harsh noise. The density can be immense, but it does not always behave as one perfectly immobile slab. Bass-driven fuzz, damaged static and feedback continually churn within the larger mass. This mobility is essential to Take Her to the Woods. A completely fixed wall might suggest enclosure, but these pieces feel like movement within enclosure: brush being pushed aside, machinery changing load, feet losing stable ground or electrical pressure searching for another exit.

The first untitled piece is the shortest, though fifteen minutes hardly makes it an introduction in the conventional sense. It establishes the record’s physical law: broad low-frequency weight carrying rougher strata of static and electronic abrasion. The material feels close enough to eliminate perspective. Instead of hearing a noise located somewhere in front of the listener, one hears from inside it, surrounded by signals whose sources cannot be separated cleanly.

This loss of perspective parallels the title’s movement away from public space. In a city, distance can be measured by buildings, traffic and streetlights. In a dense forest, proximity becomes deceptive. A sound might originate a few feet away or across a ravine. White Gimp Mask creates an electronic equivalent by layering frequencies that imply incompatible scales. A deep rumble suggests enormous machinery or weather, while a narrow scrape resembles contact occurring directly beside the ear. The listener cannot determine the size of the environment because the recording continually changes its scale.

The opening track also demonstrates that abrasion can function as concealment. Noise is commonly described as exposure, an attack that strips away comfort and forces the listener to confront raw sound. Here it also hides. The more saturated the field becomes, the less confidently one can identify what occupies it. Information has not vanished; it has become too dense to organize. The wall protects whatever happens behind it.

The second piece extends this condition beyond twenty-one minutes, long enough for the initial aggression to become environmental. The ear begins adapting to the pressure, and adaptation reveals internal variation. Grain changes. Lower tones rise and sink. Feedback gathers briefly around one region before being absorbed elsewhere. The apparent wall becomes a moving population of smaller abrasions.

This perceptual change is one of harsh noise wall’s central powers. The genre is often dismissed as static because large-scale composition may remain nearly unchanged. Yet stability in the overall form directs attention toward microscopic movement. A listener expecting riffs, melodies or dramatic transitions may hear only repetition. A listener who remains inside the field begins noticing the irregular life of distortion itself. Take Her to the Woods uses duration to train that second form of attention.

The experience resembles staring into dense foliage. From a distance, the woods appear to be one green mass. Continued looking separates branches, shadows, leaves, insects and shifting light. The forest did not change because the observer learned to see more of it. White Gimp Mask’s electronics operate similarly. What first seems like one blast gradually breaks into pressure currents and textures, though the larger environment continues refusing escape.

The three-track structure prevents the album from becoming one uninterrupted monolith. Each restart is a new entrance into apparently related terrain. The silence between files is minimal in practical terms, but conceptually it matters. The listener leaves one enclosure and is told to enter another. Because every piece remains untitled, there is no verbal landmark explaining how the new area differs. Navigation must occur entirely through sound.

The third track, nearly identical in length to the second, feels like the completion of an ordeal rather than a conventional finale. There is no reason for the noise to resolve harmonically or reveal the story behind the title. The recording’s power depends upon maintaining the absence. “Her” does not emerge to testify, the masked figure is never shown and the woods never surrender what they contain. The final cessation does not solve the command. It merely stops transmitting.

This refusal separates Take Her to the Woods from power electronics organized around shouted narrative or ideological declaration. White Gimp Mask does not explain the fantasy, condemn it or claim it as autobiography. The release supplies an ominous command and abstract sound, leaving intention inaccessible. That ambiguity can create serious artistic pressure, but it should not be mistaken for ethical neutrality. The title gains much of its force from the implied removal of a woman from public safety and possibly from consent.

Consent is the invisible border running through the object. A mask, restraint, isolation and even frightening role-play can belong to consensual sexual practice when people establish limits and retain the ability to stop. The same imagery becomes abuse when those conditions are absent. Take Her to the Woods removes every sign that negotiation occurred. The grammar belongs to the person doing the taking, not the person being taken. “Her” is an object within the sentence rather than a speaking subject.

The record does not tell us that a real assault occurred, and there is no reason to invent one. Its violence is representational, generated through suggestion and sound. Yet representation still directs attention. Newsome chose a phrase carrying coercive potential and surrounded it with an hour of sonic enclosure. The listener is not required to decide whether the work endorses, critiques or merely inhabits the fantasy. The stronger response may be to remain aware of how little information is needed for threat to become imaginable.

That economy is one reason the album works. Extreme noise releases can bury weak ideas beneath sensational photography and elaborate language. Take Her to the Woods uses almost nothing: one command, one fence, one framed forest and three untitled tracks. The restraint leaves more room for dread. It trusts the audience’s existing knowledge of crime stories, horror cinema, missing-person cases and the cultural meanings of remote landscapes. The release does not need to show what society has already taught us to fear.

The chain-link fence also complicates the opposition between civilization and wilderness. Fences are intended to regulate access, but this one does not make the scene feel safe. It may be keeping the viewer out, keeping somebody in or merely marking neglected property whose authority has become uncertain. The woods appear inside the fence image as though nature were contained by another medium rather than physically located beyond it. The true boundary may be visual: what can be seen versus what can only be imagined.

Harsh noise behaves like that fence. It is both barrier and invitation. Its abrasive surface rejects casual listening, yet sustained attention draws the listener closer. The more forbidding the sound becomes, the stronger the desire to detect whatever may be hidden inside it. White Gimp Mask turns that desire into part of the album’s unease. Listening begins to resemble trespassing.

The release’s place within Toxic Industries’ Irritant series sharpens this formal commitment. The series was devoted entirely to harsh noise wall and issued its recordings in tiny editions of thirty-three copies. Such scarcity suits music constructed around secrecy and restricted access, though it also creates an irony. A record suggesting concealment becomes desirable partly because so few people can possess it. The collector crosses the fence by acquiring the object.

The CDr format deepens that sense of private evidence. It lacks the industrial permanence of a factory-pressed compact disc, existing closer to a duplicated document or file burned for a small group. Thirty-three copies make the release almost correspondence rather than public distribution. Each disc carries the same hour of sound into a different room, where the title becomes detached from the artist and activated inside one listener’s imagination.

White Gimp Mask arose from a Houston noise culture with a long attraction to fetish imagery, sexual menace, crime and physically abrasive electronics. Yet Newsome’s project maintains a distinct identity through its particular combination of churning density and faceless presentation. The mask matters because it denies celebrity, confession and ordinary psychological access. The person behind the work is documented, but the artwork does not ask us to interpret the noise through biography. The project exists as an instrument for concealment.

Take Her to the Woods may be heard as a kidnapping fantasy, a horror-film instruction, a fragment of overheard speech or simply a phrase whose rhythm suggested a threatening atmosphere. The album never selects among these possibilities. Its achievement is making uncertainty itself feel physical. Three walls of sound become three stages in the removal of context: face disappears, language disappears and finally location disappears.

When the last track ends, the cover remains. The fence is still intact. The inset forest still reveals almost nothing beyond the tree blocking its foreground. The command has been carried out only inside the listener’s mind, which is perhaps the release’s most uncomfortable realization. White Gimp Mask does not show us the crime. It shows how readily sound, a few words and one partially concealed landscape can make us construct it ourselves.

Whore's Breath - 2024 - Cold White / Dark Bright

 

LOUDsilence – none  101.63MB FLAC

Cold White / Dark Bright is organized around two pairs of words that refuse to remain opposites. White can be cold, but it can also blind. Darkness can conceal, yet brightness may be painful enough to prevent sight. Whore’s Breath does not resolve these contradictions through narrative, samples or dramatic shifts. The two long-form pieces place the listener inside them, allowing low rumble, muted static and granular movement to become different kinds of weather. This is wall noise stripped of the fantasy that extremity must always arrive as immediate violence. Its force accumulates through exposure.

The cover offers the first passage into that climate. Ice appears to have enclosed stems, leaves and pieces of forest debris, preserving their shapes while distorting them through transparent growth. What might ordinarily seem soft or organic has become rigid, enlarged and strangely anatomical. Frozen water forms hooks, swollen joints and translucent limbs around the vegetation. The black-and-white treatment removes the ordinary colors of the landscape, while the dark gray border and heavy lettering turn the photograph into something halfway between a winter field study and evidence recovered from an unfamiliar environment.

Ice is an ideal image for this particular kind of wall noise because it is motion held inside apparent stillness. Water has flowed, accumulated and changed state, but the result looks fixed. Close examination reveals bubbles, ridges, trapped particles and irregular surfaces created during freezing. “Cold White” behaves similarly. Its broad form is stable enough to be perceived as one continuous object, yet the interior is crowded with small variations. Static shifts in thickness, low frequencies rise and settle, and the apparent distance of the sound changes without announcing a formal transition.

This is one of the essential pleasures of ambient noise wall. The music does not reward attention by eventually revealing a hidden melody or conventional composition beneath its surface. Attention changes the scale at which the surface is heard. What initially resembles one gray mass separates into layers of rumble, dry crackle, softened abrasion and pressure that seems to move below audible activity. The longer the piece remains, the more difficult it becomes to decide whether the sound is changing or the ear is learning how to divide it.

“Cold White” suggests several varieties of blankness. It can be the white of snow covering evidence, the white of an overexposed photograph, the white of a hospital corridor or the white visual field produced when light becomes too intense to communicate useful detail. Whore’s Breath’s restraint prevents any one interpretation from becoming compulsory. The piece does not illustrate a blizzard or imitate machinery freezing in an abandoned building. It establishes a pale acoustic surface onto which such associations can form and disappear.

The word “cold” also describes emotional distance. Harsh noise often feels intimate because it enters the listener’s body through volume, vibration and headphones, but this piece withholds personality. There is no voice explaining who made the sound or why. No performer’s gesture is easily visible through the electronics. The listener receives physical proximity without social contact, an environment pressing against the ear while remaining indifferent to whoever has entered it.

That indifference distinguishes the piece from power electronics or dramatic harsh noise, where the sound may imply confrontation between aggressor and victim. “Cold White” does not appear to attack. It continues. Its persistence is more geological than interpersonal. One may leave, lower the volume or redirect attention, but the wall gives no indication that it has noticed. This makes the music severe in a manner louder theatrics sometimes fail to achieve. Hostility requires recognition; climate does not.

The name Whore’s Breath creates a productive contradiction with this impersonality. Breath is warm, moist, bodily and temporary, while the album’s atmosphere is frozen, dry and strangely permanent. The project name also carries judgment, intimacy and social contempt, naming a human exhalation through the stigmatized identity assigned to the person producing it. Cold White / Dark Bright withdraws almost all explicit sexuality from that phrase, leaving breath as an invisible pressure moving through a resistant environment. The body is absent, but something continues circulating.

“Dark Bright” reverses the first track’s proportions without abandoning the same fundamental method. Darkness is normally treated as the absence of visual information, yet a bright sound can exist inside it as glare, electrical edge or concentrated friction. The wall remains muted enough to avoid becoming a conventional high-frequency assault, but its granular details feel more exposed against the title’s imagined darkness. Brightness appears not as reassurance but as a disturbance that makes the surrounding blackness easier to perceive.

The paradox resembles looking toward a distant light while standing outside at night. The illuminated point does not reveal the entire landscape. It contracts vision around itself, making everything beyond its small radius appear darker. Whore’s Breath uses textured static in a comparable way. A sharper grain enters awareness, and the lower field around it seems deeper. One layer does not replace another; it changes how the neighboring layer is measured.

The two pieces consequently function less as separate compositions than as alternate developments of one material philosophy. “Cold White” emphasizes matter, enclosure and the slow formation of a surface. “Dark Bright” emphasizes contrast, perception and the way one frequency can reorganize an entire field. Together they suggest photographic negative and positive images whose details remain related even when their values have been reversed.

This pairing also prevents wall noise from being mistaken for thoughtless repetition. Whore’s Breath does not rely upon obvious editing or abrupt transformations to prove that choices are being made. The decision to keep a sound, allow it to regress, or permit a subtle texture to remain submerged can be as compositional as introducing a new instrument. Minimalism makes those decisions more exposed because there are fewer theatrical events available to distract from duration.

Duration is not empty space being filled by static. It is the medium through which static becomes psychologically active. During the opening minutes, the listener may search for structure according to ordinary musical habits. After those habits fail, another mode of perception begins. The wall can merge with ventilation, traffic, plumbing and electrical hum in the listening room. External sounds briefly appear to belong to the recording, while parts of the recording seem to continue after playback stops. The release becomes porous, absorbing the environment rather than sealing itself away from it.

That permeability suits a digital album issued through a small netlabel. There is no elaborate physical object demanding to be treated as the definitive container. The files can enter headphones, computers, home stereos and rooms whose existing noises will alter each encounter. LOUDsilence’s broad interest in ambient, drone, industrial and noise places the record in a context where categories are less important than sustained atmosphere. Cold White / Dark Bright can be called minimal harsh noise wall, ambient noise wall, drone or textural noise without any one term exhausting what it does.

Whore’s Breath is the project of Cincinnati artist David Hilshorst, whose rapidly expanding catalog has moved among fixed walls, shifting walls, active noise and more texturally experimental approaches. That prolific activity could encourage listeners to treat individual releases as interchangeable entries in one enormous static archive. Cold White / Dark Bright argues against that response. Its particular identity comes from moderation. The sound is neither a completely immovable block nor a sequence of obvious transformations. It progresses and occasionally seems to regress, returning toward earlier densities without becoming exactly what it was.

Regression is especially interesting in wall noise because conventional music trains us to understand movement as development. A composition is expected to advance, accumulate or approach resolution. A wall can erode, thicken, return to a previous state or simply remain. Such movement resembles natural processes more closely than dramatic storytelling. Ice melts unevenly. Darkness deepens as the eye adjusts. Static changes because attention cannot remain in one condition forever.

The album’s achievement lies in making this restricted vocabulary feel sufficient. Two titles, two long surfaces and one frozen image create a complete environment. Nothing needs to shout, confess or reveal a hidden source. The apparent simplicity becomes a discipline through which differences too small for ordinary music are permitted to matter.

Cold White / Dark Bright is not a wall built to keep the listener outside. It is a wall whose surface becomes the entire location. There is no room behind it containing the real event. The crackle, rumble, pressure and faint internal movement are the event, and sustained attention becomes the method of entry. The ice remains frozen, the dark remains dark, but neither condition is still. The closer one listens, the more activity appears inside what first seemed blank.

VA - 2009 - Frequency Of Decomposition Vol. 1

 

Xerxes – FOCD:0001  401.67MB FLAC

Frequency of Decomposition Vol. 1 is assembled less like a conventional compilation than a sealed laboratory in which thirteen different organisms have been left to contaminate one another. The cover announces this beautifully: botanical growth, insects, birds, human figures, reels of tape and an enormous piece of scientific machinery coexist in a strange ecology where nature, technology and recorded sound have ceased respecting their assigned categories. “Decomposition” therefore means more than decay. It describes the breakdown of distinctions between instrument and accident, composition and malfunction, living system and mechanical process. Released in 2009 by Yasutoshi Yoshida’s Xerxes label, the collection captures an international harsh-noise network that had been developing through physical mail, touring, cassette exchanges, CD-R labels, personal websites and small printed publications. The CD is not merely thirteen tracks gathered onto a disc. In its original oversized sleeve, accompanied by Japanese-language interviews and a report on American noise activity, it becomes a portable document of how information moved through the underground before social media flattened every scene into the same endless feed.

Jazkamer begins the procedure with “Ass Fucking Murder,” an interpretation of a Brainbombs composition. That is an inspired point of entry because Brainbombs and Jazkamer approach brutality from almost opposite directions. Brainbombs traditionally depend upon repetition, primitive rock structure and a deliberate atmosphere of moral ugliness; Jazkamer can treat sound itself as unstable matter, capable of suddenly changing density, velocity or physical state. Removing a Brainbombs piece from the stubborn machinery of a band and feeding it into Jazkamer’s noise vocabulary does not cleanse the original. It strips away the recognizable body and leaves the aggression wandering without its skeleton. Kakerlak’s “Nymphal Mechanics” follows with a title that could serve as an alternate description of the cover art. Kakerlak’s work has always suggested infestation as an acoustic condition: rust, granular distortion, constricted movement and the sensation of something multiplying inside a wall. The transition from Jazkamer to Kakerlak establishes the compilation’s early language. This will not be a parade of interchangeable loudness. Each artist is being asked to reveal what kind of material their noise appears to be made from.

Astro, the long-running project of Hiroshi Hasegawa, answers with “Unknown Scratch.” Hasegawa’s electronics often reach beyond industrial imagery toward something astronomical, where oscillators resemble magnetic storms, damaged transmissions and immense events observed through inadequate equipment. The word “scratch” grounds that cosmic scale in a tiny act of friction. It might be a damaged surface, a needle crossing an obstruction or a wound in the recording itself. Kazuma Kubota’s “Crushed Amplifier” then brings the signal back into a more intimate zone of pressure and emotional rupture. Kubota was still relatively early in his recorded development when this compilation appeared, but the title already identifies amplification not as a neutral delivery system but as an object that can itself be broken, compressed and made expressive. His later work would become known for an unusually sensitive form of cut-up noise, capable of making violent edits feel almost vulnerable. Heard within this sequence, his contribution occupies the point where equipment failure begins to sound autobiographical.

Linekraft’s “Devil Smoke” supplies the compilation with a heavier industrial body. Masahiko Okubo’s project is associated with metal percussion, severe programmed structures and the physical vocabulary of factories, militarization and historical machinery. Linekraft does not merely imitate industrial sound; it treats industry as a system through which human beings organize violence, memory and obedience. “Devil Smoke” feels like a particularly condensed title for that approach, joining combustion with superstition, material production with an invisible contaminant. Azoikum’s accurately timed “4 Minute Psychosis” follows as both a promise and a formal boundary. Psychosis here is not presented as an expansive psychedelic voyage. It has been measured, packaged and allotted four minutes, suggesting that even psychic collapse can become an engineered product. The first half of the compilation repeatedly performs this trick: chaotic sound is placed inside extremely deliberate containers. Track lengths, sequencing, titles and physical packaging do not tame the noise, but they give its instability a sharply defined frame.

PCRV’s “Glencoe” shifts the geographical and emotional atmosphere. Matt Taggart’s PCRV emerged from the American cassette and mail-art continuum, using electronics, contact-based sounds and rapid improvisational decisions to create noise that often seems to think while it is happening. The title “Glencoe” is unusually open compared with the bodily violence, machinery and psychosis surrounding it. It may signify a location, a memory or simply a word carrying private weight. That ambiguity gives the collection a useful pocket of distance. Thirdorgan’s “The People Who Own the Dark” immediately fills that space again. Akihiro Shimizu has been producing noise since the beginning of the 1990s, and Thirdorgan belongs to a Japanese tradition in which density can become a form of ecstatic excess rather than mere confrontation. The title introduces social power into the darkness. Darkness is not empty, natural or democratically shared; somebody owns it. Noise becomes a method of entering territory whose boundaries and landlords remain unseen.

Defektro’s “Horizontal Blue” is one of the compilation’s most intriguing conceptual turns. Founded by Hirofumi Uchino, Defektro has long used handmade machines, mechanical devices, sonic weapons and junk constructions, allowing the equipment to behave as sculptural performers rather than obedient tools. “Horizontal Blue” suggests a line, field or atmospheric band rather than a collision. Coming after Thirdorgan, it opens the compilation outward. The sequence now begins moving away from concentrated harsh noise and toward stranger hybrids. This is where the curatorial intelligence of Frequency of Decomposition becomes clearest. A less thoughtful noise compilation might try to maintain maximum impact until the final second, producing an hour of diminishing returns. Yoshida instead allows the disc to decompose its own initial premise. The shared harsh-noise language established at the beginning gradually breaks apart, exposing voices, spiritual imagery, personal memory and eccentric electronic composition underneath.

Venus In Vergo’s “The One Path--Is The Infinite Light” is the decisive rupture. Sumihisa Arima’s electronics support lyrics and vocals by Reiko A, bringing the human voice into a collection that has largely treated humanity as something submerged beneath circuitry. Even the title changes the philosophical temperature. After murder, infestation, crushed amplification, devil smoke, psychosis and darkness, an infinite light appears. It would be too simple to call this relief. The spiritual vocabulary is so absolute that it becomes uncanny, particularly when surrounded by artists who distrust stable meanings. The track proposes transcendence while the compilation’s structure quietly asks what transcendence sounds like after machinery has dismantled nearly every familiar musical sign. Rather than weakening the harsher material, this contrast reveals how narrow the standard definition of extremity can become. A whisper, declaration or devotional gesture may be more destabilizing than another wall of distortion when it arrives in the correct place.

Government Alpha’s “Sight Seeing In 1994” brings the curator himself into the sequence, but the title looks backward rather than claiming the present. Government Alpha began in the early 1990s, so 1994 belongs near the project’s formative period. “Sightseeing” is a strangely casual phrase for retrospection, suggesting movement through one’s own past as though it had become a foreign city. Noise is particularly suited to this kind of memory because it does not preserve events cleanly. It retains pressure, texture, interruption and emotional voltage, the parts of experience that often survive after chronology has dissolved. S.Isabella’s “Quotidian Queasiness,” produced and mixed by Yoshida, then reduces disturbance to an everyday condition. “Quotidian” means daily, ordinary and recurring. Queasiness is no longer a dramatic crisis but the background sensation of normal life. The compilation closes with pheromonsterDISK’s wonderfully ambiguous “Henry_OK?” Instead of a grand conclusion, it leaves a message hanging in the air. Who is Henry? What happened? Is “OK” reassurance, a technical status or a worried question sent to someone who has stopped responding? After so much sonic certainty, the final punctuation is doubt.

What makes Frequency of Decomposition Vol. 1 valuable is the way it preserves noise as a conversation rather than a genre checklist. Norway, Japan, Germany, Australia and the United States are connected here not by uniform aesthetics but by a common willingness to treat sound as physical evidence. Some contributions grind machinery against the listener; others resemble nervous systems, damaged communications, private rituals or contaminated memories. There are moments in the central harsh section where the artists’ vocabularies nearly merge, but even that temporary blur is informative. It demonstrates how international underground networks can develop a shared language, then shows individual personalities escaping from it again. The physical fanzine and interview material were therefore not decorative bonuses. They belonged to the same process as the audio, extending the compilation through words, reports, correspondence and scene documentation. Anyone who owns the complete package, remembers ordering it directly from Xerxes or knows more about the sessions and the mysterious final pieces is invited to add that knowledge. A compilation like this was created by a network, and its history is best preserved by allowing that network to keep speaking.

Tonstartssbandht - 2009 - An When CDr

 

Dœs Are – DooB  197.36MB FLAC

There is something wonderfully appropriate about an album called An When being made by a group called Tonstartssbandht. Both phrases appear to have arrived from a neighboring language that does not quite exist, assembled from recognizable pieces but refusing to settle into ordinary meaning. The record begins with a track called “Tonstartssbandht?” as though even its creators are looking at the word with uncertainty. Is that the band’s name, the genre, a question, an invocation, or the noise made by a machine attempting to identify two brothers through a damaged database? In barely more than a minute, the album establishes a world where names remain provisional and songs can change identity while they are being played. This is pop music made by people who clearly love pop music, but who do not believe a song must remain inside its original container once they have opened it.
Andy and Edwin White grew up in Orlando, Florida, but by the time of these recordings they were living between Montreal and New York, developing the band through periods of separation, shared visits and exchanged files. That distance matters. An When does not feel like two musicians standing in one room and documenting a stable repertoire. It feels like correspondence. One brother sends a rhythm, voice or guitar fragment into the air; the other answers from another city, and the reply alters the meaning of the original message. The record was created during the moment when online file exchange was quietly changing what a band could be. A group no longer needed a permanent rehearsal space, a local scene or even simultaneous physical presence. Songs could travel through email, Megaupload and MediaFire, gathering layers as they crossed borders. The method becomes audible in the album’s restless architecture. Ideas arrive, mutate, vanish and occasionally return wearing somebody else’s coat.
“Black Country” is the first fully formed pop song, although “fully formed” is a dangerous phrase to use around Tonstartssbandht. Beneath the damaged surfaces is a genuine melodic instinct, the kind that makes an eccentric recording memorable rather than merely unusual. Its title and central guitar shape appear to playfully glance toward Big Country, but the song quickly disappears into the Whites’ private vocabulary of city life, reverb, interrupted thoughts, repeated syllables and affectionate nonsense. The lyrics move between dealers, trains, Montreal’s Lachine district, sleeplessness and the Doobie Brothers, creating a personal geography assembled from overheard speech and mental debris. The production does not polish those fragments into clarity. It allows them to remain crowded together, much as memories of a city become inseparable from songs heard there, apartments occupied there and people loved there.
Then comes “Little April Showers,” a version of the song from Disney’s Bambi. Its placement is perfect because it destroys any theory the listener may have developed during “Black Country.” Rather than treating the song as an ironic novelty, the brothers recognize the strangeness already inside it. The original composition translates falling rain into overlapping voices, rhythmic syllables and miniature orchestral weather. Tonstartssbandht bring those elements into their own homemade vocal laboratory, where sweetness and distortion are not opposites. The result connects childhood memory with experimental recording practice. A song encountered through animation becomes raw material decades later, its innocence preserved but refracted through worn equipment, layered voices and adult awareness. It is nostalgic without becoming obedient to nostalgia.
“5FT7” may be the album’s most open-hearted piece. Its repeating declaration, “I’m five foot seven, you know I’m a little buttercup,” is funny, vulnerable and strangely triumphant. The surrounding lyrics imagine travel, Los Angeles, Orlando, Washington, swimming pools, jobs, movies and a possible shared life inside a bungalow. Instead of separating sincerity from absurdity, the song lets them strengthen each other. Affection frequently enters real conversation through jokes, nicknames and deliberately foolish statements because direct emotional language can feel too exposed. “5FT7” understands that a ridiculous refrain can carry a serious longing. The track’s later life, including a video assembled from period performance footage and its return through subsequent vinyl editions, makes sense. It contains an early blueprint for Tonstartssbandht’s enduring appeal: enormous feeling delivered through a form loose enough to breathe.
The minute-long “Welsh Souper” reduces language to a handful of sounds, including a borrowed Hindi phrase and the emphatic announcement of its title. It behaves like a scrap left on the studio floor that somehow became indispensable. Many bands would either discard such a piece or inflate it into a respectable song. Tonstartssbandht understand that an idea may already be complete after sixty seconds. “Midnite Cobras,” by contrast, pushes outward, piling voices, noise and recurring phrases into one of the record’s most overloaded moments. Melody survives inside the static rather than standing safely above it. The song repeatedly seems ready to collapse, but each breakdown reveals another hook or rhythmic possibility. This tension between destruction and catchiness is central to An When. Noise is not applied after composition as a fashionable coating. It participates in composition, obscuring one path while opening several others.
“Andy Summers” continues the album’s collision of private references and public culture. The Police guitarist becomes a character, a launch mechanism and a phrase whose repetition gradually severs it from its original owner. Books, bicycles, Florida, weather, summer jams and invented spiritual classifications tumble through the track. Meaning accumulates through proximity rather than narrative logic. This is one of the record’s most blog-era qualities. During the late 2000s, online music discovery often resembled wandering through an overgrown personal archive. A song might sit beside an animated GIF, an old photograph, a broken download, an unexplained joke and several references understood only by the uploader’s friends. An When possesses that same collage intelligence. It does not stop to label every object because mystery is part of the hospitality.
By “M’old Jæp,” the human voice has almost replaced the conventional band. The song circles around a Jeep Grand Cherokee, stretching a mundane consumer object into a companion, mantra and vehicle through eternity. Repetition makes the words less intelligible but more emotionally charged. The effect suggests that language has a hidden stage beyond communication, where a phrase repeated enough times becomes texture, rhythm and environment. Edwin would explore related possibilities through his Eola recordings, but An When shows this vocal imagination already functioning inside the brothers’ shared project. Voices do not merely sing melodies. They imitate instruments, create percussion, smudge the border between speech and sound and populate the record with several exaggerated versions of the same two people.
“Walken With Jesus” transforms Spacemen 3’s “Walkin’ with Jesus,” changing one letter and potentially inviting Christopher Walken into the title’s spiritual drama. The joke does not erase the devotion and conflict inside the song. Its narrator has encountered heaven on Earth but expects punishment for choosing earthly pleasure, friendship, confusion and love. Tonstartssbandht accelerate and rearrange the material, emphasizing voices and keyboards rather than simply reproducing the original’s narcotic guitar atmosphere. It becomes less a cover than a transmission received by unfamiliar equipment. This is how influence operates throughout the album. Disney, psychedelic rock, radio pop, devotional music, noise and family humor are not displayed as separate record-store sections. They enter the same bloodstream and emerge as something recognizably related to all of them but owned by none.
The closing sequence, “ORO,” “Imenope” and “Softly Kidding,” moves farther from ordinary song construction. Samples and vocal loops become increasingly self-sufficient, as though the album is dismantling the machinery it used to create its earlier pop songs. “Imenope” is especially suggestive. Its title resembles a compressed recitation of alphabet letters, a child’s learned sequence folding into a single invented word. Repeated voices make that word appear to change without necessarily changing at all. The listener begins hearing subdivisions, phantom syllables and possible meanings generated by expectation. By “Softly Kidding,” the album has reached a place where title, voice, gesture and atmosphere can barely be separated. It does not end with a grand statement. It simply slips beyond the point where the original question can be answered.
The physical history of An When reinforces its character. It began as a self-released CDr, then migrated through tiny cassette editions, digital files and several vinyl incarnations before receiving a wider Fire Talk reissue in 2022. Each version freezes a different stage in the transformation of something that initially belonged to a small, fast-moving network of blogs, basement shows and direct exchanges. The CDr remains especially appropriate. A recordable disc suggests immediacy rather than permanence: make the object, draw or print something for it, send it outward and continue working. Yet these supposedly temporary formats often become the most accurate documents of a musical life because they preserve decisions before history has organized them into a clean career narrative.
Listening now, An When does not merely sound like an early version of the band Tonstartssbandht would become. It contains possibilities they could have pursued forever: psychedelic pop group, vocal ensemble, noise project, electronic duo, classic-rock mutation, devotional prank, archive of brotherly communication. The record’s achievement is that it refuses to choose among them. Its inconsistencies are not problems awaiting correction. They are evidence of two young musicians discovering that identity can remain plural without becoming empty. Later recordings would give their guitar-and-drums performances greater duration, physical power and improvisational space, but this compact album captures the laboratory before any single creature escaped and became dominant.
An When also preserves a specific faith in recording. It believes that an inexpensive or imperfect sound can contain a complete world; that a joke may become sacred through repetition; that a Disney song can coexist with blown-out noise; that brothers living in different cities can build a room together inside exchanged files. The album does not ask whether these combinations are tasteful, marketable or stylistically coherent. It asks whether they produce life. Again and again, the answer is yes. Anyone who encountered the original CDr, cassette editions, early downloads or the Montreal shows surrounding this period may remember details that formal discographies cannot hold. Those memories belong beside the music because An When was never only a finished object. It was a message in motion, and somehow it is still arriving.

Putrefier - 2012 - Beyond Scathing

 

Industrial Recollections – none  268.37MB FLAC

The title promises a point beyond verbal injury. “Scathing” usually describes criticism sharpened until it can cut, but this recording begins where criticism has already exhausted its vocabulary. There is no argument to follow, no accusation to decode and no conventional composition inviting admiration for its construction. The four untitled pieces operate directly upon the nervous system, reducing electronic sound to friction, pressure, vibration and residue. Even the project name is exact. A putrefier is not merely something rotten but an agent that causes decomposition. Mark Durgan’s machines do not illustrate decay from a safe distance. They actively perform it, breaking stable tones into unstable matter and allowing recognizable electronic gestures to spoil before they can become music in the ordinary sense.
Although this edition appeared in 2012, the material originated in 1986 as a C46 cassette on Durgan’s Birthbiter label. The reissue therefore does not document a mature artist recreating his youth with improved equipment or digitally imitating the textures of obsolete technology. It retrieves the original organism intact. The sounds still carry the cramped physicality of an early home-recording system in which every component had to perform several jobs at once. A Korg MS-10, Jen SX1000, digital delay, phaser and distortion pedal form a modest inventory, but limitation becomes the source of the recording’s scale. Instead of spreading dozens of software layers across an unlimited virtual workspace, Durgan discovers how much instability can be generated by forcing a small chain of machines to disagree with one another.
The opening twenty-two-minute piece occupies approximately half the original cassette and establishes the complete environment. It does not advance through melody, rhythm or recognizable sections. Frequencies accumulate, thin out, rupture and reappear in altered states. Delay creates damaged repetitions rather than spaciousness, producing signals that return carrying fresh injuries. The phaser bends surfaces that were already unstable, while distortion makes it increasingly difficult to distinguish the original tone from what has happened to it. Synthesizer, effect and amplification cease to sound like separate stages in a chain. They merge into one electrical body whose internal organs are continually rubbing against one another.
What prevents this long opening from becoming a featureless block is Durgan’s attention to density. The sound may be harsh, but it is not permanently full. Certain frequencies dominate and then withdraw, exposing lower movement, dry crackling or a narrow tone that had been concealed beneath the larger mass. The apparent dimensions of the recording also keep changing. At one moment it resembles a faulty appliance operating inside an empty room; shortly afterward it seems to extend across an entire industrial district. These shifts occur without cinematic samples, elaborate multitracking or a descriptive title telling the listener what to imagine. Scale is produced through pressure alone. A small change in frequency can suddenly make the walls appear farther away.
The cassette format is inseparable from this experience. A privately distributed tape in 1986 was not a polished monument awaiting historical recognition. It was a vulnerable physical message entering a network of mail, advertisements, trades, brief reviews and personal correspondence. Copies would have been heard through different decks, amplifiers, speakers and headphones, each system contributing its own hiss, compression, mistracking and mechanical fatigue. The listener did not receive a perfect master preserved identically across the world. Every copy acquired a slightly different body. That instability suits Putrefier because the music itself refuses the fantasy of an untouched original. Signals are valuable precisely because they can be contaminated.
The four-minute second piece changes the terms by compressing the same hostile vocabulary into a much smaller enclosure. After the long first side’s gradual occupation of space, events now arrive as incidents rather than landscapes. Textures do not remain long enough to become environments. They flash into existence, collide and disappear. The shift reveals an important quality in Durgan’s work: beneath the apparent disorder is a strong instinct for duration. He knows when a sound has exposed its essential property and when continuing it would merely repeat information already delivered. The machines may appear autonomous, but the recording is not the result of switching them on and walking away. Human judgment remains audible in every decision to hold, interrupt, redirect or abandon a texture.
The ten-minute third section offers another arrangement of the same limited materials without becoming an interchangeable slab. Sharper electronic edges compete with broader low-frequency movement, creating tension between penetration and immersion. One layer attempts to enter the listener as a thin blade while another tries to engulf the entire room. This conflict distinguishes the recording from the generic idea of a “wall of noise.” A wall suggests uniformity, a single surface blocking passage. Beyond Scathing is more unstable than that. Its surfaces buckle, split and reveal pressure moving behind them. The violence comes not only from loudness but from uncertainty about what the sound will become from one moment to the next.
The six-minute conclusion does not resolve the recording. With every piece left untitled, there is no narrative destination to reach and no final image capable of gathering the preceding material into a comfortable explanation. The ending feels practical rather than ceremonial, as though the available tape simply concluded while the electrical experiment remained capable of continuing elsewhere. This refusal of completion is one reason the material remains alive. The listener is not given the satisfaction of watching chaos conquered by structure. Structure itself has been exposed as temporary, something that can corrode as readily as any electronic signal.
The absence of titles also protects the music from a common trap within industrial and power-electronics culture. Extreme sound is often surrounded by imagery so forceful that the listener begins hearing the artwork and track names more than the recording. Violence, pathology, political atrocity and sexual transgression can become instructions that narrow interpretation before the first sound begins. Beyond Scathing offers almost none of that guidance. Its severity is not borrowed from an external horror. The electronics must generate their own moral and emotional atmosphere. This leaves the listener alone with the physical behavior of sound, where disgust, fascination, anxiety and pleasure can arise without being assigned to a prefabricated subject.
There is also something revealing about the particular technology used. These machines were designed to produce controllable musical results: notes, effects, repetitions and tonal modifications. Durgan treats their intended purposes as the beginning of the investigation rather than its boundary. Distortion is no longer decoration added to an otherwise complete signal. It becomes a method of discovering information hidden inside that signal. Delay is released from its supporting role and turned into unstable memory, forcing each sound to encounter a previous version of itself. The phaser introduces movement without providing direction. Every component is encouraged to exceed its official job description until equipment failure and artistic intention occupy the same territory.
That process gives the recording an earthly quality despite its electronic sources. It does not float with the frictionless cleanliness often associated with synthesizer music. The sounds have weight, grain and apparent temperature. They seem capable of leaving residue on nearby objects. This materiality connects early Putrefier to the larger cassette underground while also distinguishing Durgan’s approach from projects built primarily around vocals, slogans or theatrical confrontation. Beyond Scathing does not need a human voice shouting above the electronics because the circuitry has already acquired a voice of its own. It groans, spits, contracts, repeats itself and occasionally seems to choke upon its previous output.
The 2012 Industrial Recollections edition performs a valuable archival act by moving the recording out of the extreme scarcity of its original cassette circulation. Yet the CD does not domesticate the material. Reissues can sometimes turn unstable underground artifacts into historical exhibits, cleaned up and placed behind glass where their importance is easier to appreciate than their sound. Beyond Scathing resists that treatment. Its roughness is too active to become merely quaint evidence of the 1980s. The recording still appears to be happening rather than representing something that happened. The machinery may be old, but the pressure remains present tense.
This is why the work should not be valued only as an early chapter in Mark Durgan’s history. It contains a proposition that remains useful long after its original technology has become collectible: complexity does not require abundance. Modern digital systems can produce limitless tracks, effects and revisions, but an unlimited workspace can conceal indecision as easily as it enables freedom. Here, five pieces of equipment create complexity through resistance. Each machine places restrictions upon the others. The artist must listen closely because a minor adjustment may alter the entire system. The recording becomes a study in consequences, every change generating a new set of problems that cannot simply be repaired with an undo command.
Beyond Scathing ultimately preserves curiosity beneath all its abrasion. Its harshness is not empty punishment, nor is it aggression performed merely to establish extremity. It is the sound of someone fascinated by what equipment might do after its normal uses have been stripped away. How far can a tone be degraded before it becomes another substance? At what point does repetition cease to resemble memory and begin behaving like contamination? Can a machine appear physically alive without imitating any recognizable living creature? The cassette does not answer these questions. It keeps feeding them back through the circuitry until inquiry itself becomes noise.
Anyone who encountered the original Birthbiter cassette or corresponded with the label may hold parts of its history that no discography can preserve: how it was advertised, what accompanied it through the mail, how the packaging looked in the hand and what those electronics sounded like through the domestic equipment of the period. Such recollections belong beside the formal release information. Beyond Scathing began as a small object moving between individuals, collecting physical and personal differences wherever it landed. Four decades later, it continues doing what its name implies, decomposing the border between obsolete machinery, private memory and living sound.

Toshiya Tsunoda and Taku Unami - 2024 - Wovenland 3 3xCD

Erstwhile Records – erstwhile 100-3  900.52MB FLAC

 Wovenland 3 begins with a river speaking to its neighbors and ends with a stream playing drums. Between those events, libraries become polite or unconscious, traffic applauds, bamboo brooms sing, lakes speak, bowling balls perform solos and people are stretched, reversed, relocated or cut into pieces. The titles describe a world in which ordinary distinctions have become unreliable. Human beings, locations, animals and objects exchange abilities. A field can contain progressive rock. A fountain can merge with a siren. A recording of a person can be separated from that person, carried elsewhere and made to communicate with a landscape that never encountered the original body. Toshiya Tsunoda and Taku Unami do not merely document an environment and then decorate it electronically. They treat recording as the beginning of a peculiar biological process through which places and events can be dismantled, crossbred and returned to the world as new acoustic organisms.

This is the concluding installment of a collaboration that began with Wovenland in 2018 and expanded through the double-CD Wovenland 2 in 2020. The first volume established the foundational gesture by bringing separately recorded environments into contact, weaving places together even when their geographical distances made such contact impossible. The second examined transformations more systematically, subjecting recordings to freezing, equalization, extraction and radical changes of speed. Wovenland 3 absorbs those earlier strategies but feels less like a demonstration of procedures than a fully inhabited country. The processes remain audible and the titles often announce them, yet the results no longer seem to exist merely as examples of what a particular operation can do. The sounds have become characters. They meet, imitate one another, trade physical properties and participate in scenes whose logic is simultaneously scientific and comic.
Tsunoda and Unami call Wovenland a band, although it never performed concerts and existed primarily through editing sessions. This definition is more than an amusing provocation. A conventional band organizes relationships among people playing instruments in shared time. Wovenland organizes relationships among recordings, locations, memories, software processes and absent participants. Editing is not postproduction applied after the performance because editing is the performance. Cutting, extending, isolating, reversing and combining are equivalent to striking a drum, beginning a guitar solo or answering another musician’s phrase. The studio becomes the room where the members meet, except some of those members are waterways, birds, fireworks, brooms, traffic, libraries and people who may not know they have joined a band.
The opening disc introduces this enlarged membership with “river speaks to neighbors,” a title that immediately replaces landscape recording’s usual posture of observation with social interaction. A river is no longer scenery placed before a microphone. It is an active presence whose surrounding sounds can be understood as neighbors rather than background. This small linguistic shift changes the listener’s position. We are not outside the environment receiving a picturesque document of it. We have entered a community of pressures, vibrations and interruptions in which human hearing is only one local resident. “Mariko & Tetsuya” and “one day in the park” briefly reintroduce recognizable human scale, but the following pair, “library politeness” and “library unconsciousness,” divides a single type of public space into two psychological states. Politeness suggests the intentionally controlled behavior of bodies inside a library: lowered voices, restrained footsteps and objects handled with care. Unconsciousness suggests everything occurring beneath that social discipline, including machinery, ventilation, structural resonance and incidental sounds that continue without concern for etiquette.
“Car traffic applause” and “bamboo broom singing” extend this transformation of function. Applause normally indicates human approval, while singing implies an expressive voice. Transferring those terms to traffic and a broom does not turn the sources into cute imitations of people. It exposes the degree to which listeners already organize sound through human categories. A burst of vehicles can possess the density and collective timing of applause without intending celebration. Repeated contact between broom and ground can produce phrasing without intending song. The music does not claim that objects secretly possess human consciousness. It demonstrates that musical meaning is assembled in the encounter between vibration, recording process and listener. Once attention has been redirected, the border between expression and accident becomes remarkably porous.
“Dissecting a park 1, 2 & 3” introduces one of the set’s recurring verbs. Dissection usually promises knowledge through division. A body is opened and separated so its internal structures can be examined, but the original living unity is destroyed in the process. Digital editing offers an acoustic equivalent. A field recording can be divided into spectral bands, transient events, isolated frequencies or tiny fragments, revealing components that ordinary listening had fused into one continuous place. Yet the more completely the park is dissected, the less it resembles the experience of standing in a park. Wovenland repeatedly occupies this contradiction. Analysis can make hidden details available while simultaneously producing an environment that never existed. The manipulated recording may be factually derived from reality, but it is no longer realism.
The neighboring titles “throwing stones at birds” and “fireworks in water” sound almost like acts of impossible or irresponsible play. They place force against vulnerable flight and combustion inside a substance that should extinguish it. Whether these titles describe actual sources, studio combinations or conceptual images, they establish a poetics of collision. Wovenland is produced whenever two things that ordinarily remain separate are made to interfere with one another. The results are not seamless hybrids. Tsunoda and Unami often preserve the uneasiness of the joining, allowing the listener to sense incompatible distances, scales and surfaces occupying the same stereo space. The weave remains visible. Instead of creating an illusion that the sources naturally belonged together, the work lets their disagreement become compositional energy.
The first disc closes with two expansions: “expanded screaming girl” and “expanded bamboo explosion.” Expansion in digital sound can mean longer duration, enlarged detail, isolated spectral content or the conversion of an instant into an environment. A scream and an explosion are normally brief events whose meanings depend upon suddenness. Lengthening either one changes its identity. Alarm can become drone; impact can become landscape. The listener is allowed to enter an event that ordinary time would have carried away almost immediately. This is not simple slow motion. Once an instant has been extended far beyond its natural life, tiny internal motions acquire independent weight. What had been heard as one sound begins to resemble a population.
The second disc continues the work of dissection but becomes increasingly social and theatrical. “Dissecting insects 1, 2 & 3” turns toward lives whose sensory scales already differ radically from ours. An insect inhabits vibration, distance and time through a body unlike the human body, so processing its sound cannot merely reveal an objective insect reality. It creates another translation layered upon the biological translation already taking place in our ears and nervous systems. “Party Time!” then arrives with the cheerfulness of an announcement in a room where the guests may be recordings rather than people. The exclamation mark matters. Throughout this project, humor prevents the conceptual framework from hardening into academic solemnity. Tsunoda and Unami can investigate perception, ontology and acoustic analysis while still enjoying the absurdity of a bowling ball becoming a drummer.
“Sirenfountain,” “speaking lake” and “Shinya in Broadway” reveal the album’s fondness for compression and relocation. Two sources can fuse into a new word, while a person can be inserted into a commercial or architectural setting as though the recording were a portable body. “Mariko reversed and dissected in Inzai” makes this operation explicit. Mariko is not simply recorded in Inzai. Her recorded presence is reversed, divided and then situated there. The title acknowledges both person and manipulation rather than pretending the studio process is transparent. This is crucial to the ethics of the series. The microphone is never presented as a neutral window. Every act of selection, placement and transformation is allowed to announce itself.
The bowling sequence is among the release’s most playful inventions. “Bowling singing,” “bowling plays drum solo” and “bowling Mariko” treat the acoustic violence of a recreational object as a flexible performer. A rolling ball and scattering pins already contain rhythm, impact, resonance and decay. By editing these properties, the artists can reveal a hidden percussion ensemble without needing to impose conventional drumming upon it. Yet the titles also invite slapstick imagery. One can imagine bowling itself stepping forward to sing or taking an extended solo while the human musicians wait. The comedy is not separate from the acoustic investigation. It helps the listener release habitual ideas about dignity, authorship and what deserves to count as an instrument.
“Dissecting the stream” and the later “stream plays drums” form a miniature narrative across the final two discs. First the stream is taken apart; eventually it returns as a percussionist. Analysis becomes education or mutation. After its internal patterns have been isolated, the water can be heard performing rhythms that were perhaps present all along but unavailable to ordinary attention. This movement summarizes the Wovenland method. A source is recorded, broken into components and reassembled until it seems to have acquired a new ability. The transformed result is artificial, but its materials remain anchored in an actual event. Reality has not disappeared. It has been reorganized.
The third disc deepens the album’s concern with time and memory. “Those days on the rooftop” is followed by “these days on the rooftop,” each lasting exactly the same duration, while later pieces reverse the pattern through “these days in Inzai” and “those days in Inzai.” The mirrored titles imply that time can be treated like another editable source. Past and present may share a location and duration without sharing an identity. A rooftop revisited is physically continuous with the earlier place, yet the sounds, bodies, weather and listener have changed. Recording preserves something from “those days,” but playback always occurs in “these days.” Wovenland does not resolve that temporal gap. It turns the gap into material.
“Slow bird” takes a living motion commonly associated with speed and lightness and subjects it to another clock. “Throwing the stone to the party” appears to revisit the earlier stone-throwing piece, redirecting the projectile from birds toward the gathering announced on the second disc. Events begin to migrate through the album’s internal history. Sources that once occupied separate pieces become available for later recombination, creating a web of references that behaves almost like memory. “Broadway bowls” performs another reversal of agency, while “those days in Inzai” and “these days in Inzai” return human and geographical material to altered contexts. The set increasingly resembles a place remembering itself incorrectly but productively.
The wonderfully titled “prog-rock in the field (thanks to Bros. tacarin)” may be the clearest declaration that genre can emerge from environmental material rather than being imposed through conventional instruments. Progressive rock is associated with elaborate structures, technical display, shifting sections and inflated scale. A field recording might possess all those qualities once its events are isolated and rearranged, although no organism or machine present at the location intended to perform progressive rock. The title opens a trapdoor beneath genre itself. Perhaps musical categories are not fixed collections of instruments and traditions but temporary ways of grouping motion. Under sufficient attention, a field can become a band.
The conclusion, “stream plays drums,” is expansive enough to feel like a final performance, but it does not turn the project into conventional music at the last moment. Instead, the title completes the album’s redistribution of agency. The stream has moved from recorded landscape to dissected object to performing member. Water does not literally understand rhythm, but rhythm does not require understanding in order to exist. The human contribution lies in framing, extracting and arranging patterns so they become available to another mode of attention. The artists have not taught the stream to play. They have taught the recording to reveal a possible drummer inside it.
Across three CDs, Wovenland 3 turns the familiar world into something less stable but more populated. It asks whether a place remains itself after its sounds have been separated, enlarged and combined with distant events. It asks whether identity belongs to a source, a recording, a processing method or the listener who reconstructs continuity from fragments. Most importantly, it refuses to make those questions feel like homework. The release is filled with jokes, collisions, named friends, impossible actions and moments when technical manipulation resembles a children’s game invented by two extremely attentive adults.
Tsunoda and Unami reportedly spent only a small number of actual working days together across the project’s seven-year life. That scarcity gives the trilogy an unusual scale. Six CDs of material grew from brief meetings, patient recording and concentrated studio encounters rather than constant activity. Their announcement that Wovenland is now disbanding feels both serious and gently absurd, since this was already a band without concerts, regular rehearsals or conventional instruments. Yet the ending is real. The accumulated recordings form a complete body of work whose final volume pushes its central idea until landscape, person, object and software become members of one temporary ensemble.
What remains after the disbandment is a different way of hearing. Traffic may applaud without approval. A broom may sing without lungs. A library can possess both manners and an unconscious. A river may speak to neighbors who cannot translate its language, and a stream may play drums without ever becoming human. Wovenland 3 does not claim that the world is secretly waiting to entertain us. It suggests something stranger and more generous: the world is already full of structures, interactions and performances that exceed the narrow equipment of ordinary attention. Recording does not merely preserve those realities. In the hands of Tsunoda and Unami, it cuts openings through which entirely new realities can crawl.