Coteries - 2020 - Oris Circumcisio CS

Originally posted May 5, 2020 10:57PM

Dead Gods ‎– 046

The first side begins in the mouth. Not metaphorically in the sense of voices or speech, but physically: the sound lives in the part of hearing that seems to catch behind the teeth. For several minutes Coteries holds an intensely bright electronic field almost completely above the weightier part of the spectrum. It hisses, burns and needles forward with very little underneath to soften it. The remarkable thing is how long that condition lasts. There is no need to immediately demonstrate range. The recording simply stays there until the ear has adjusted to an environment that initially feels almost uninhabitable.
Then it starts descending. The change is slow enough that it would be difficult to mark the exact point where the first state stops existing. Five or six minutes in, deeper material is becoming easier to notice beneath the glare. By eight minutes, the balance has unmistakably shifted. The harsh upper layer is still present, but the recording has acquired a body underneath it, and from there the migration continues. The abrasive surface loses more and more of its authority while lower vibrations take its place. Somewhere in the middle of this long transition, the piece seems to pass through almost every intermediate state between hiss and rumble.
That movement becomes especially dramatic after ten minutes. The sound keeps sinking. What had initially occupied the head begins to feel increasingly located in the room and then in the body. By twelve or thirteen minutes, very little remains of the opening brightness. Deep sustained vibration has taken control, and the final third becomes almost entirely subterranean. The volume also begins recovering after having gradually weakened through the middle, so the low sound does not merely replace the high sound. It grows.
By fifteen minutes, Side A has effectively become another piece without ever having changed pieces. The last several minutes are dominated by a huge low presence, astonishingly distant from the abrasive opening. It feels less as though Coteries introduced a second sound than as though the first sound has been stretched downward until it became this one. The side ends with substantial physical force in a part of the spectrum that was barely participating twenty minutes earlier.
Flip the cassette and Side B begins exactly where Side A spent so long arriving. The low vibration is immediately enormous. For the opening minutes there is very little ambiguity about where the center of the recording is located. A deep tone presses continuously underneath everything else, sometimes close to a single sustained fundamental, sometimes roughened by smaller movements around its edges. Instead of beginning with irritation and acquiring a body, Side B begins as body.
For nearly ten minutes Coteries remains remarkably committed to this condition. There are alterations inside it, but the great low presence barely loosens its grip. The sensation is closer to being held inside sustained vibration than listening to a sequence of events. Because the sound is so stable, tiny changes become strangely conspicuous. A slightly brighter edge appears. The vibration gains a roughness it did not have before. Another overtone becomes briefly audible and then slips back inside the larger hum. Time stretches because almost nothing offers itself as conventional punctuation.
Then, around eleven minutes, the floor suddenly gives.
The recording becomes noticeably quieter and the massive low foundation loses a surprising amount of its authority. After spending the first half of the side almost completely submerged, the ear is abruptly allowed upward. What follows is not a return to Side A’s opening all at once. The climb happens gradually. Rougher middle-range activity becomes increasingly visible; then thinner and sharper material begins appearing above it. Each minute seems to move the recording a little farther away from the giant fundamental tone that dominated the beginning.
The final several minutes complete enough of that ascent to make the architecture of the whole cassette clear. Side A travels from abrasion toward vibration. Side B begins as vibration and works back toward abrasion. They do not trace perfectly identical paths, and that is important. This is not a symmetrical electronic exercise. The return journey has been altered by where the cassette has already been. The sound does not come home unchanged.
That makes the title particularly effective. Oris Circumcisio roughly translates as a cutting or circumcision of the mouth. The phrase is bodily, procedural and uncomfortable, and the recording spends nearly forty minutes relocating sensation around the listener’s body. Side A begins where harsh sound almost seems to touch the teeth and gradually sinks toward the chest and gut. Side B starts inside that bodily vibration and slowly exposes the sharper edges again.
The images on the physical cassette add to that atmosphere without providing an explanatory key. The body is treated as something that can be photographed, cropped, reproduced, obscured and subjected to procedure. The package does not turn the title into a simple story, and the audio does not illustrate the photographs. They share a colder relationship: the sense that something physical is being examined while simultaneously being altered.
Coteries was already making what Richmond coverage described as “enveloping atmospheric noise,” but this recording takes the enveloping part unusually literally. It does not merely surround the listener with noise. It moves the apparent location of that noise over time. Nearly forty minutes become one extremely slow relocation.
Side A goes down.
Side B comes back up.
What returns still has the cut on it.
—ChatGPT

Form Hunter - 2019 - Mercy Killing CS

 Originally posted Jan 23, 2022 10:20PM

Dead Gods – GODS39

Part One takes almost ten minutes to make instability feel ordinary. It begins cautiously, with relatively little occupying the recording, then starts collecting material around itself. During the first minute the sound gains considerable size without making a theatrical entrance. What was initially distant becomes persistent. A repeated electronic movement establishes itself, roughens, gets crowded by another layer, and continues anyway. The piece seems less interested in introducing new objects than in seeing how long the existing ones can remain recognizable while being continually interfered with.
By roughly two minutes the recording has found its working condition. Several motions coexist without ever fitting together comfortably. Something repeats low underneath; rougher activity passes across it; another element occasionally rises far enough to redirect attention before sinking back into the machinery. Nothing behaves cleanly enough to become a beat, yet there is continual recurrence. The ear begins anticipating returns even though each return arrives slightly damaged.
One of the stronger changes comes around the two-minute mark, when the earlier stability is briefly disturbed and the piece seems to reassemble itself. Afterward the sound becomes more stubborn. For several minutes it maintains an almost industrial continuity, but the individual parts keep trading importance. A buried motion suddenly becomes obvious. Something raspier moves over it. The underlying cycle persists while its surroundings keep being replaced.
Around four and a half minutes the recording changes complexion again. There is less sense of one large mechanism and more of several smaller activities rubbing against one another. That does not last either. By five and a half minutes another stronger form has gathered, and the second half proceeds through repeated episodes of expansion and partial collapse. The interesting movement is not from quiet to loud. It is from coherence to confusion and back again.
Late in Part One, around eight minutes, the machinery seems briefly weakened. The surrounding material becomes thinner and individual elements are easier to separate. Then the track gathers itself again for one final stretch. What remains near the end feels rougher and less secure than the version heard several minutes earlier. The system has survived its own duration, but it does not sound unchanged by the experience. The last seconds finally withdraw rather than delivering a grand finish.
Part Two begins with far less hesitation. The recording is already occupied, and for its opening several minutes it behaves with greater confidence than Part One initially did. Repeated motion, low electrical movement and rougher sounds above it coexist almost immediately. Because the piece does not need to build its environment from nothing, attention moves straight toward the relationships between the parts: what interrupts what, what disappears behind what, what keeps returning despite everything around it.
Around three minutes there is a noticeable disturbance. The balance shifts, briefly making the piece feel as though one part of the mechanism has been removed while everything else continues operating around the vacancy. The sound recovers, but the interruption matters because it makes the previously dependable repetition seem vulnerable. From that point onward, the track feels capable of failing.
The largest rupture arrives later, around five and a half to six minutes. For a moment the whole construction seems to buckle. What had been moving with considerable consistency becomes thinner, stranger and less anchored. Then the recording returns with renewed force during the following minutes, but the return is not a reset. The parts come back carrying the damage with them. Repetition becomes harsher, more agitated, and less convincing as evidence that the system is actually stable.
That makes the final third particularly effective. The recording keeps operating while sounding increasingly spent. Familiar shapes recur, but they no longer carry the confidence they had at the beginning. The last minute especially feels like attrition. Material begins falling away, the larger motion loses strength, and by the end there is a genuine sense of something reaching the limit of how long it can continue.
Across both parts, the most interesting quality is endurance. Sounds repeat not because repetition provides comfort or order, but because repetition gives them something to survive. Every return offers another opportunity for alteration. A cycle continues long enough to become recognizable, then long enough to become damaged, then long enough that the damage itself begins feeling normal.
The cassette transfer preserves that process well. Neither file shows obvious digital clipping, and there are no long accidental dropouts breaking the continuity. The roughness belongs to the recording rather than presenting itself as a damaged rip. That matters here because so much of the piece depends on being able to hear deterioration as part of the performance rather than mistaking it for a failing transfer.
The single photographed object gives very little explanatory help, which is probably preferable. There is no need for the package to tell the listener what all this machinery represents. The audio is already specific enough. Two approximately ten-minute parts establish systems, injure them, restore them imperfectly, and keep going.
Part One learns how to continue.
Part Two discovers that continuing has consequences.
—ChatGPT

Shredded Nerve - 2018 - Milking The Predator Nest CS

Originally posted Mar 5, 2019 1:28AM

Dead Gods ‎– 021

The grotesque agricultural wording suggests extraction before the cassette even starts, and the two parts really do sound less like compositions being performed than a mechanism being made to continue producing after it has begun resisting the process. Repetition is everywhere, but it rarely provides stability. A cycle comes around again slightly misshapen, another piece rubs against it, something falls behind, and what initially seemed mechanical begins sounding exhausted.
Part 1 lasts almost ten minutes and starts surprisingly deep. Much of the opening is carried by a repeated low movement with smaller scraped and distorted sounds caught around it. It has a slow, awkward gait rather than the instantaneous attack of a lot of harsh noise. For the first couple of minutes the machine seems capable of maintaining itself. The repetition is ugly but dependable. Then the relationship between the parts begins slipping. More middle-range abrasion enters, the low cycle becomes less dominant, and individual sounds start arriving as though they are no longer quite synchronized with the process that produced them.
Around the middle, the recording grows considerably stronger. Instead of simply getting louder, it seems to become more crowded with competing motions. One repeated figure pushes forward while another drags behind it. Shorter bursts catch against longer loops. At moments there is almost a rhythm, but it is the rhythm of something operating badly: a belt slipping, a mechanism failing to complete the same movement at the same speed twice, pieces continuing because stopping is apparently not an option.
The most forceful stretch arrives around five to six minutes. By then the tentative opening has become a stubborn mechanical churn, with the low end repeatedly shoving against rougher material above it. Then the process starts losing pieces. During the last several minutes, what had been one large apparatus begins breaking into more exposed components. The recording gets thinner in places, heavier again in others, but increasingly sounds spent rather than triumphant. The final minute is almost a withdrawal. The low sound remains after much of the surrounding activity has weakened, then it too drains away until only the residual recording is left.
Part 2 begins much more aggressively. There is more upper abrasion immediately, more obvious tearing and scraping, and substantially more force than at the beginning of Part 1. It sounds as though the machine has been restarted without being repaired. During the first ninety seconds, deep repeated motion and bright electronic damage coexist at nearly equal strength, giving the opening a violent instability that the first part had taken several minutes to reach.
Then the balance keeps moving. Around a minute and a half, the upper material becomes particularly severe, almost stripping the piece down to a harsher exposed surface before heavier motion works its way back underneath. For the next few minutes the track keeps cycling between these states. What is interesting is that none of them feels like a clean section. One condition leaks into another. The low movement never completely leaves when the brighter noise takes over, and the abrasion remains embedded when the bottom returns.
At roughly five minutes, the structure suddenly weakens. The recording drops sharply in force, as though the machinery has stalled. This is not the ending. After the collapse, pieces begin working again, but the recovery feels compromised. The following minutes contain familiar ingredients from earlier in the cassette, only now they sound less secure. Low cycles reappear. Scraped electronics accumulate above them. A repeated action tries to establish itself and becomes increasingly ragged.
The last couple of minutes are some of the strangest material on the tape because the sound regains considerable strength without regaining stability. Bright abrasion pushes forward again, the deeper machinery continues underneath, and both seem to be consuming whatever remains. Then the system starts shutting down for real. The final stretch rapidly loses substance until almost nothing remains.
Across the two parts, the important movement is not simply quiet to loud or low to high. It is competence turning into failure. Part 1 sounds like a process gradually becoming unable to maintain its own timing. Part 2 begins with that failure already underway, briefly collapses, forces itself back into operation, and finally exhausts itself.
That makes the title unusually funny and unpleasant at the same time. “Milking” implies repeated extraction from something expected to keep yielding. “Predator” reverses the normal relationship between the thing doing the extracting and the thing being exploited. “Nest” makes the whole phrase even stranger, suggesting not one creature but a place where whatever is being drained might reproduce. The music never illustrates any of that literally, which is better. It simply keeps pulling.
The physical cassette is similarly withholding. There is very little on the object that tells you how to interpret what is happening. The images and reproduction feel processed rather than explanatory, leaving the absurd title and the mechanical behavior of the recording to collide on their own.
Compared with the later Shredded Nerve material, this feels especially fixated on failure itself. The loops do not merely repeat so that they can accumulate. They repeat until repetition becomes a problem.
Something keeps asking for more.
Eventually there is nothing left to give.
—ChatGPT

Mistletoe - 2019 - Azoth 2xCS

Originally posted Nov 29, 2019 8:27PM

 Dead Gods ‎– 044  324.88MB FLAC

Four sides, nearly an hour, and almost none of the miniature scale heard on Mistletoe’s earlier Winters Return. These recordings have time to remain somewhere long enough for the ear to accept a condition as permanent, then alter it so gradually that the original condition becomes difficult to remember. The later description of these pieces as “decompositions,” recorded live directly to chrome cassette, is particularly good. They do not behave like compositions being assembled from parts. They sound more like existing masses being allowed to decay, separate, contaminate one another and become something else.
The first side lasts about thirteen minutes and begins remarkably deep. A sustained low presence occupies much of the opening, accompanied by quieter harmonic activity that seems attached to it rather than independent from it. For several minutes Mistletoe lets that low foundation persist with very little urgency. What initially sounds almost fixed gradually develops rougher edges. Additional tones collect around the central vibration, slight beating appears between them, and the upper part of the recording becomes increasingly active. Around the halfway point the transformation becomes much easier to hear. The side that began heavily anchored near the bottom has started climbing. By the last several minutes the sound is substantially brighter and more abrasive, with upper harmonics multiplying until the original low foundation no longer controls the whole picture. The remarkable part is that there is no obvious moment of conversion. Nothing announces that one state has ended. You arrive somewhere else and realize the landscape behind you has disappeared.
The second side, nearly sixteen minutes, initially seems to restore what the first side lost. Again there is a powerful low component, this time held with even greater stubbornness through the opening several minutes. The recording feels broad and slow, with the kind of sustained vibration where tiny changes begin assuming disproportionate importance. Then, somewhere around six minutes, the floor changes. Much of that enormous bottom suddenly retreats and the piece becomes considerably more exposed through its middle and upper range. After so much time submerged, the effect is startling. Sounds that would have seemed modest in another context suddenly appear naked. The remaining ten minutes never completely rebuild the opening. Instead the piece inhabits this altered condition, rougher and more porous, allowing smaller oscillations and scraped harmonic material to move through spaces previously occupied by the low drone. Toward the end some weight returns, but it returns to a recording that has already been chemically changed.
Cassette two begins almost from zero. Side C is about fifteen and a half minutes, and its opening is one of the most dramatic uses of restraint anywhere in the set. Very little seems present at first. Then, during the first minute, the recording rapidly acquires substance. A faint signal becomes a large one; additional tones gather; what had seemed empty suddenly contains a whole environment. For the next several minutes this is the most broadly active of the four sides, with sustained sound continually roughening, swelling and changing shape. Around the middle, however, something gives way. The larger structure briefly weakens and seems to collapse inward. What follows is extraordinary: instead of rebuilding the same broad field, Mistletoe allows an enormous low tone to take possession of the recording. By roughly nine minutes, the side has become almost subterranean. Much of what previously occupied the middle and upper regions has been displaced by this huge fundamental vibration, and it remains there for the rest of the piece. Side C therefore performs one of the strangest transformations in the set: near-silence becomes complexity, complexity collapses, and the collapse reveals something much simpler and heavier underneath.
The final side, about thirteen minutes, feels less like another independent experiment than the set digesting everything that came before it. It begins cautiously, gathers considerable force during its first several minutes, and reaches one of its busiest states somewhere around the first third. There are rougher harmonics, sustained electronic friction and several layers occupying the recording at once. Then, around the middle, the entire balance drops downward. Much of the brighter activity disappears and a lower, calmer vibration assumes control. Unlike Side C, the transition does not lead to another dramatic rebuilding. Mistletoe stays there. The second half becomes increasingly patient, almost suspended, with the low material continuing while smaller details flicker at its edges. After almost an hour of repeatedly watching sounds emerge, accumulate and alter themselves, the refusal to make one last large gesture feels exactly right. The set ends by remaining with what is left.
That four-part movement is what separates this from simply being an unusually long drone release. Each side teaches the ear a different relationship to duration. The first slowly changes altitude. The second establishes a massive foundation and unexpectedly removes it. The third appears from almost nothing, grows complicated, then collapses into an immense low remainder. The fourth grows and finally settles. Heard continuously, those are not four versions of the same technique. They are four ways of asking what survives transformation.
The physical format matters here more than it did on Winters Return. Two cassettes force three interruptions into nearly an hour of sustained sound: flip the first tape, remove it, replace it, flip the second. Those mechanical breaks divide something that otherwise feels unusually continuous. The photographs and printed material likewise resist giving the set one simple explanatory image. It arrives as several objects and several surfaces, which is appropriate for music whose identity keeps changing depending on where in the process you encounter it.
“Azoth” was the alchemical name for mercury and, in another usage, the imagined universal remedy of Paracelsus. I would not claim that the four recordings are illustrating alchemy, but the word is unusually well chosen for what they actually do. Mercury refuses a fixed shape. These pieces behave similarly. A tone that seems to be the foundation becomes residue. Something barely audible becomes enormous. Complexity decomposes into a single vibration. What seems finished becomes raw material for the next state.
The interesting question across these four sides is never really, “What sound comes next?”
It is, “Is this still the same substance?”
—ChatGPT

Jackson-Pratt - 2018 - Concrete Tunnel CS

Originally posted July 27, 2018 1:14PM

 Dead Gods ‎– 023

“Darkvision” begins with repetition before it begins with chaos. Blunt low bursts keep returning with enough regularity that the opening almost feels mechanical, like some enormous damaged thing cycling through the same action. There are gaps around those first impacts, which makes each return unusually distinct. Then the gaps start closing.

Within the first half-minute the recording has thickened dramatically. What began as separate blows gets swallowed by a continuous low grind, and from there Jackson-Pratt spends most of the piece forcing different abrasive shapes through that foundation. The interesting thing is how little true high-frequency spray there is at first. Much of “Darkvision” lives low to the ground, all churn, rumble and overloaded movement, with harsher material appearing more as interruptions than as the main body.

That gives the track a strange sense of forward motion. The repeating shapes never turn into a beat, but they keep suggesting one. Something cycles, gets damaged, cycles again. Around the middle, individual sounds become increasingly difficult to trace back to a source. There are brief metallic impressions, distorted impacts and rough oscillations, but everything is being crushed together fast enough that recognition lasts only a second.

During the final third the sound slowly begins climbing out of that deep register. More jagged material becomes exposed, especially after four minutes, and the recording feels increasingly scraped open. It is not a sudden transformation. The tunnel just seems to get narrower. By the final minute there is less room around anything, more friction between the parts, until the program cuts out and leaves the cassette suddenly empty.

“Receiving Vault” opens differently. There is more activity immediately across the whole recording, with low thudding movement underneath a rougher, more complicated surface. For the first minute and a half it keeps switching emphasis without settling: heavy vibration, harsher scrape, another low surge, something brighter poking through.

Then around 1:40 the track changes radically.

For roughly the next forty seconds, much of the huge bottom falls away and the recording becomes dramatically brighter and thinner. All the ugly material that had been partially cushioned by bass is suddenly exposed. Scraping, buzzing and sharper electronic movement dominate, with enough space around them that the sound almost seems smaller even while becoming more abrasive. It is the clearest structural break anywhere on the cassette.

Around 2:20 the weight comes crashing back.

That return makes the middle of “Receiving Vault” feel enormous. The sharper material does not disappear completely, but it is now riding on top of a much deeper mechanical shove. From there the piece repeatedly changes its center of gravity: sometimes buried and blunt, sometimes more ragged and exposed, with neither condition lasting quite long enough to become dependable.

The last minute does something particularly effective. Brighter material starts climbing back into the recording again, producing another stretch of scrape and electrical agitation, but this time the low sound never fully disappears. Both states coexist for a while before the track finally loses strength. The ending feels less like a stop than a system powering down with several parts still fighting to remain audible.

The title Concrete Tunnel suits this cassette because the music continually plays with confinement. These are not wide-open blasts where every frequency simply sprays outward. Sounds hit boundaries. Repetition rebounds. Low material seems trapped underneath harder surfaces, then finds another way through. “Darkvision” spends almost six minutes moving through one increasingly constricted passage; “Receiving Vault” keeps opening and sealing different chambers.

The photographs and physical presentation make that sense of containment stronger without spelling anything out. The imagery is cool, murky and difficult to read cleanly, while the cassette itself remains a blunt little physical object holding two very compressed pieces of sound. Nothing about it asks to be elegant.

A contemporary 2018 description of Jackson-Pratt called the project “short bursts of scrap metal harsh noise.” That is remarkably accurate here, except the bursts have been packed tightly enough that they start behaving like architecture.

You can hear individual impacts.

Then the walls arrive.
—ChatGPT

Skin Graft - 2019 - Solstice CS

Originally posted May 13, 2019 3:11PM

Dead Gods ‎– 034

The first side begins so far below its eventual size that the opening minute almost functions as a distant warning. A low vibration is already there, accompanied by thinner electronic abrasion, but the recording feels held back. Nothing suddenly announces the beginning. Instead the sound spends the next several minutes steadily approaching. By two minutes it has gained considerable force; by four, what had seemed remote has become unavoidable; by six, the cassette is operating at an entirely different physical scale from where it started.
What makes that rise effective is how little it resembles a conventional crescendo. There is no melody climbing toward a peak and no obvious series of dramatic steps. The same damaged machinery simply keeps gaining authority. Low churning motion remains underneath while coarse electrical material rubs against it, occasionally producing sharper squeals or brief flashes of something almost metallic. Individual sounds are difficult to isolate because they seem welded together, yet the proportions are constantly changing. The first few minutes feel deep and muffled. Later, more of the middle of the recording opens up and the whole thing becomes rougher, broader and increasingly exposed.
Around seven minutes the ascent finally seems complete. From there the side does not need another trick. Skin Graft holds the accumulated force in place and lets it grind. The last two minutes are the fullest section of the recording, with the underlying rumble and harsher material operating together rather than one hiding behind the other. Only near the very end does the upper edge sharpen noticeably, almost as though the piece has burned away enough of its heavier material to reveal something hotter underneath. The interesting part is remembering how little was present ten minutes earlier. Side A does not travel by changing subjects. It changes scale.
Side B starts by taking nearly all of that accumulated scale away.
For almost four minutes the recording stays remarkably restrained. A deep continuous sound sits underneath sparse abrasion, and the level barely moves. After Side A, it feels almost unnaturally calm, not peaceful exactly, but contained. The piece seems willing to remain there indefinitely. That patience makes what happens next far more effective.
At roughly the four-minute point, the entire recording steps forward. The increase is abrupt enough to feel less like gradual development than somebody opening a valve. Suddenly there is far more activity in the middle of the sound, the low foundation becomes surrounded by a dense mechanical churn, and what had been distant becomes immediate. The contrast is enormous because Skin Graft has spent nearly half the side refusing to prepare you for it.
From there the piece stays lit. Buzzing, grinding and repeated surges continually reshape the surface, but the dramatic event has already happened. The threshold has been crossed. There is no return to the subdued opening. Instead the remaining six minutes work through different versions of this louder state, sometimes letting the deep vibration dominate, sometimes allowing harsher material to scrape its way forward. Late in the side the upper portion becomes increasingly active, giving the final minutes a more agitated quality without requiring another major structural break.
The word “solstice” makes an interesting title for that design without needing to turn the tape into a cosmic metaphor. A solstice is a point where movement in one direction reaches an extreme and turns. These two sides repeatedly make the listener notice such points. Side A is almost all approach, moving steadily toward maximum force. Side B establishes a long plateau and then abruptly leaves it behind. The important moments are not individual noises so much as the instant when the relationship between everything changes.
The artwork stays restrained enough to let that idea remain implicit. Several black-and-white photographic images, sparse lettering and the cassette itself provide fragments rather than an explanation. Nothing on the package tells the listener what the word is supposed to mean. It simply names the object and leaves the audio to produce its own turning points.
Skin Graft is Wyatt Howland, whose recordings have long combined harsh electronics, feedback, industrial clatter and enormous low-end movement. What is especially good here is the control underneath all that ugliness. Nearly twenty minutes are built around only a few large decisions, and Howland trusts them enough not to clutter the tape with unnecessary ones.
Side A spends ten minutes arriving.
Side B waits four minutes before opening the door.
Neither bothers to close it.
—ChatGPT

Hostage Pageant - 2019 - Shielding CS

Originally posted on May 13, 2019 3:04PM

Dead Gods ‎– 035

For two sides that last almost exactly the same amount of time, these recordings behave very differently. Side A is the more immediately imposing half: close to ten minutes of heavy electronic movement that rarely gives the listener much distance from it. Side B is quieter, less uniformly forceful and much more willing to let pieces of its structure collapse, disappear or reassemble somewhere else. Together they make “Shielding” feel less like two matched noise pieces than two different ways of obstructing access to whatever is underneath.
Side A begins low and blunt. During the opening seconds an enormous bass-heavy signal occupies most of the recording, with rougher material working around its edges. It does not sound like an introduction waiting for the real piece to begin. The machine is already running. Over the first couple of minutes that initial bottom-heavy character starts acquiring more detail: buzzing layers, scraping movements and distorted shapes appear through the center of the sound, sometimes becoming distinct for a few seconds before another element pushes over them. Hostage Pageant keeps the overall level remarkably steady, so the changes happen less through dramatic volume shifts than through one thing continually blocking another.
That becomes the side’s particular trick. A sound starts to reveal itself and another one moves across it. A repeating mechanical figure becomes noticeable, then a heavier surge masks part of the repetition. Something rough and almost rhythmic pushes through for several cycles before the surrounding electronics swallow its outline. Rather than creating a clean sequence of sections, Shane Church seems to continually replace the visible surface while leaving the overall force intact. The piece feels busy without becoming frantic.
Around the middle, the low end becomes especially stubborn. For several minutes the recording sits inside a thick band of rumbling and grinding motion, and the smaller events have to fight their way out of it. There are brief moments where some of the weight disappears and a sharper electronic shape becomes suddenly obvious, but these openings rarely last. The shield closes again.
The last two minutes change that balance more decisively. The deepest part of the sound begins losing ground, and the recording becomes increasingly centered on a rougher middle register. What had spent most of the side feeling massive begins to seem thinner and more exposed. By the final thirty seconds, the transformation is striking: there is much less of the subterranean body that dominated the beginning, leaving a comparatively wiry, abrasive remainder. Side A does not end where it started. It has gradually shed its armor.
Side B enters at a noticeably lower level. That difference matters immediately after flipping the cassette. Instead of another huge entrance, the opening feels as though the same machinery has been moved behind a wall. Deep sound is still present, but there is more room around individual motions, which makes the odd details easier to notice. The first few minutes repeatedly alternate between heavy low vibration and scratchier passages where the recording suddenly seems much smaller. Hostage Pageant is constantly changing apparent distance.
Then, around three and a half minutes, the piece seems to stumble. The signal briefly loses a substantial amount of force, almost as though something has been disconnected or pulled backward. It is one of the clearest events on the cassette precisely because so much of the surrounding material is continuous. The sound recovers quickly, but once that interruption has happened the remainder of Side B feels less dependable. Similar changes keep occurring: a thick section abruptly narrows, another low surge arrives, a rough midrange pattern takes over, then the bass reasserts itself.
The second half becomes increasingly restless without ever turning into obvious cut-up noise. The transitions are rough enough that the listener can feel them happening, yet they rarely behave like clean edits. It is more like watching electrical current repeatedly find another route through damaged equipment. Around eight minutes the recording grows sharper again, but instead of following Side A toward an exposed ending, Side B eventually sinks downward. The final half-minute is dominated by deep low sound, almost the reverse of Side A’s finish. One side ends after gradually abandoning its bottom. The other ends by returning to it.
That makes the title unusually useful without needing to force a story onto it. Throughout these twenty minutes, sounds repeatedly shield other sounds. The loudest layer becomes a cover for quieter activity underneath it. Remove that cover and suddenly an entirely different piece seems to have been present all along. Then something else moves in front. The interest is not simply that Hostage Pageant changes textures quickly. It is that the hierarchy keeps changing: foreground becomes obstruction, obstruction becomes subject, and whatever seemed hidden eventually becomes the thing doing the hiding.
The physical package reinforces that refusal to offer one clear surface. Images, reproduction and cassette documentation arrive as layers rather than a single explanatory picture. That suits Hostage Pageant especially well. Church’s harsh noise has always been unusually mobile, built from sounds colliding and being redirected rather than from maintaining one immovable wall. Here that mobility is compressed into two nearly symmetrical ten-minute lengths.
Same amount of tape.
Different protection.
—ChatGPT

Shredded Nerve - 2019 - Thinning Veil CS

Originally posted on Nov 21, 2019 11:24PM

Dead Gods ‎– 037  56.32MB FLAC

Thinning Veil lasts only about eight minutes, but its two sides seem to move in opposite directions. Side A begins at a distance, gathers itself into something substantial, then spends its final stretch gradually disappearing. Side B starts restrained and comparatively patient, waits more than half its length, and then suddenly becomes the louder and more violent half of the cassette. Put together, they feel almost hinged at the center: one closing down while the other eventually tears open.
Side A runs about 3:56. Its first seconds are surprisingly modest, with a rough repeating shape sitting inside plenty of open space. During the first minute the recording steadily acquires mass. More sounds begin clinging to the central motion and what started almost skeletal becomes increasingly tangled. By forty or fifty seconds the piece has reached a much more forceful state, but Shredded Nerve does not simply leave it there. The components keep rubbing against one another, sometimes producing a dull mechanical churn, sometimes a more brittle scrape, with bits of repetition continually surfacing just long enough to suggest a pattern.
The middle is the fullest part. Several layers seem to be moving at different speeds, and the attraction comes from trying to follow one before another obscures it. There are moments where a repeating figure almost behaves like rhythm, but it never becomes orderly enough to provide a dependable beat. Things drag, catch and slip. The sound feels constructed from loops that have been allowed to deteriorate through contact with one another.
Then, a little after two minutes, Side A begins changing character. The solid body accumulated earlier starts thinning out while sharper, rougher remnants become increasingly exposed. By the final minute the piece is clearly losing strength. Sounds that had been buried inside the larger construction now hang almost by themselves. The decline continues in stages rather than through one conventional fade, until the last seconds are barely holding anything together at all.
Side B lasts about 4:05 and initially refuses to answer that ending with another big entrance. It begins quieter and more exposed, with a scratchier repeating surface and considerably less weight underneath. For almost two minutes the piece remains relatively contained. There is motion everywhere, but it feels withheld, as though the cassette is idling rather than announcing itself. Little rough cycles repeat, change slightly and repeat again. Shredded Nerve lets that condition persist long enough that it starts feeling permanent.
It isn’t.
Around the halfway point, the recording begins swelling. The change is initially subtle, but by roughly 2:20 the whole side has started accelerating into a much more aggressive state. New material appears underneath and around the repeating figures, the recording gets physically larger, and the previously exposed loops are suddenly being crowded from every direction. Instead of Side A’s gradual erosion, Side B keeps adding force.
The final ninety seconds are the cassette at its most intense. What had spent the opening half scratching quietly at the surface has become a hard, continuous collision of repeating fragments and electronic abrasion. The increase is especially effective because the track made you wait for it. Nothing in the opening promises this much sound. By around three minutes, the restraint is gone.
Even then, there is still organization inside the attack. The noise keeps circling around recognizable recurring shapes rather than dissolving into an anonymous blast. Something returns, gets buried, pushes back through, then returns damaged again. That repeated survival of small sounds inside a larger destructive process feels particularly characteristic of Shredded Nerve. Lakes has long worked with loops, field recordings, ordinary objects and electronics, and here those materials seem less like ingredients than things being subjected to wear.
Then Side B collapses quickly at the end. After spending its final section getting increasingly large, it suddenly has nowhere else to go.
The title becomes unusually physical across the two sides. “Thinning veil” can suggest something mystical, but the cassette does not require that interpretation. You can simply hear material being concealed and exposed. Side A gradually removes what had been covering its smaller sounds. Side B begins with those smaller sounds exposed and eventually buries them beneath something much larger. What lies behind the veil keeps changing depending on which direction you approach it from.
The packaging suits that ambiguity. Across the folded artwork and cassette photographs, images are cropped, obscured and reproduced rather than presented as one clean explanatory picture. You keep getting partial information. Nothing quite offers itself whole. That is also how the audio behaves: loops appear without revealing their sources, recognizable motions repeat without explaining what made them, and sounds continually pass between foreground and concealment.
Compared with the earlier Shredded Nerve material in this Dead Gods group, this feels remarkably concise. There is no need for twenty minutes of accumulation. Each side gets one strong trajectory and follows it.
Side A gathers, then evaporates.
Side B waits, then breaks through.
For a tape called Thinning Veil, the most interesting thing may be that neither side ever shows you what was supposedly hidden behind it.
—ChatGPT

White Rhino Taxidermy - 2019 - Detriment CS

Originally posted May 13, 2019 1:08PM

Dead Gods – 033

Detriment sounds less like White Rhino Taxidermy assembling noise than trapping it.

Side A is about six minutes and ten seconds, and after the initial entrance it settles into an unusually persistent roar. There are changes everywhere inside it, but almost none of them provide relief. The overall force barely budges. Rough bands of electronics grind together, narrow whistles poke through and disappear, heavier material keeps churning underneath, but the piece refuses the obvious drama of stopping, dropping out or suddenly becoming twice as loud. It simply remains.

That constancy becomes the point.

During the first couple of minutes, the sound has enough lower material underneath it to give the abrasion a solid body. Around a minute and a half, that foundation becomes less dominant and the middle of the recording seems increasingly crowded. Instead of one giant bass vibration doing the work, several uglier shapes begin fighting for the same space. Some scrape. Some buzz. Others sound almost like a motor being forced to operate while something is caught inside it.

There is a particularly strange passage around the middle where the underlying weight briefly increases again, but even that does not turn into a conventional change of section. White Rhino Taxidermy seems determined to prevent the listener from getting a clean boundary. One condition contaminates the next.

By four minutes, the side has become slightly brighter and more abrasive, but the transformation has happened so gradually that it is difficult to say exactly when the earlier version disappeared. That is one of the differences between this and Baphomet Medusa. The earlier cassette had several transformations that felt almost anatomical, as though the sound were visibly changing shape. Here the alteration is closer to deterioration. You notice the damage after it has already happened.

The final minute becomes particularly nasty. More of the grinding middle and upper material pushes forward, and the piece finishes at nearly the same sustained intensity with which it has spent most of its life. There is no reward for surviving it.

Side B is shorter, about 4:41, and immediately feels physically different. The opening has far more underneath it. A deep vibration repeatedly pushes against the rest of the recording, making the first couple of minutes feel heavier and slower even though plenty of abrasive motion is occurring above it. Where Side A seems determined to occupy one broad hostile zone, Side B has a bottom.

That low foundation keeps changing its relationship with everything else. Sometimes it dominates so completely that the harsher material feels like debris skittering across a large moving surface. Seconds later the abrasion becomes more prominent and the bass seems to retreat behind it. The two elements never quite agree about which one is the piece.

Around three and a half minutes, the balance starts tipping decisively upward. The deep foundation loses some of its authority while rougher, brighter sounds become easier to isolate. The last minute is therefore much more exposed than the beginning. It is not necessarily louder, but it feels increasingly stripped of protection. What had been cushioned by the huge low movement is left scraping by itself.

Then it ends.

That gives the cassette a compact shape without requiring much narrative: Side A refuses to let go; Side B slowly changes what it is holding onto.

The physical presentation is harsher and more deliberate than the earlier White Rhino Taxidermy cassette too. The photography has the uncomfortable quality of documentation rather than decoration, and the repeated treatment of the images makes looking at the package feel related to listening to the tape. Information is present, but it has been damaged by the way it is being presented. Detail survives without clarity.

The title Detriment is almost boringly plain compared with Baphomet Medusa and its spectacular track names, and that plainness suits the recording. There is no monster to identify this time. No strange creature assembled from multiple references. “Detriment” simply names harm.

The music does the rest.

Baphomet Medusa sounded like alteration.

Detriment sounds like what alteration leaves behind.

—ChatGPT

White Rhino Taxidermy - 2017 - Baphomet Medusa CS

Originally posted Mar 7, 2017 7:42PM

Dead Gods ‎– GODS01

The two titles on this cassette are spectacularly strange. “Its Ears Cut Off And Eyes Dyed Green To Become A Dragon” reads like a sentence torn from some dubious natural history, while “Tribute Surgical Diamondback” sounds like three unrelated labels accidentally filed together. Above them sits “Baphomet Medusa.” None of it resolves into a neat theme. Instead, the words establish a world where animals, bodies, monsters and procedures have been mixed together badly enough that taxonomy has stopped working.

The first piece lasts about 5:38 and begins with its largest sound already present: a thick, low electronic surge with rougher activity wrapped around it. For the opening half-minute especially, the bottom seems oversized compared with everything above it. Then something curious happens. Rather than continuing to get heavier, the track gradually sheds that bulk. The enormous opening vibration loses territory while a dirtier middle-range grind becomes more exposed.

That change is slow enough to be easy to miss. There is no clean edit separating one condition from another. The same ugly organism seems to keep changing proportions. What initially feels broad and blunt becomes increasingly wiry. Scrapes and buzzing tones that had been partially hidden start occupying more of the recording. Around three minutes there is a particularly noticeable shift toward a harsher, less grounded sound, as though the piece has been stripped of some of its body while being allowed to keep its teeth.

The final stretch is almost the inverse of the opening. There is still weight underneath, but the track has migrated upward. What began as something lumbering ends more exposed and irritated. Even the title starts making a peculiar kind of sense against that process. Something recognizable has been physically modified until it qualifies as something else. Whether that association was intended or not, the music certainly behaves as though it is being altered in real time rather than simply developed.

“Tribute Surgical Diamondback,” about 5:50, starts with a more jagged temperament. There is plenty of low sound here too, but it shares the space with sharper electronic abrasion almost immediately. The track keeps twitching between rough buzzing motion and deeper surges, giving it a more nervous pulse than the first side. Certain passages feel almost serrated, especially as the recording approaches the middle.

Around two and a half minutes, the character changes noticeably. The bass retreats and the track becomes unusually exposed and sharp for a stretch. Thin abrasive material takes over, with a scratchy, electrical quality that makes the sound seem smaller but somehow more dangerous. It is one of the clearest transformations on either side because the piece suddenly loses the cushion underneath its harsher elements. Everything abrasive is left standing naked.

Then the weight starts returning.

The last minute is particularly good. The recording repeatedly thickens and thins as though it cannot decide which version of itself to preserve. During the final twenty seconds, the balance suddenly drops hard toward the bottom again. After several minutes of grinding middle and upper activity, this last subterranean collapse feels enormous. The cassette does not finish by sharpening itself to a point. It grows a body again and sinks.

The artwork makes a good companion to those transformations. The pale green insert has an ornate interlocking border and a heavily photocopied central photograph labeled “Baphomet Medusa.” The reproduction has swallowed enough detail that the figure inside becomes another uncertain specimen. The other panel types out the two long track names with GODS01 underneath, while the spine carries a separate handwritten “DEAD GODS – 1867 BROADWAY” strip. The black cassette has an almost completely blank oblong label pasted across the top. It looks less designed than processed, copied, relabeled and filed.

That makes this a fitting place for Dead Gods to begin. GODS01 does not arrive with a manifesto. It presents two peculiar titles, approximately eleven and a half minutes of electronics, a damaged-looking image and a catalog number. White Rhino Taxidermy takes things that initially seem solid and keeps tampering with them until their outlines change.

By the end, even the noise has undergone taxidermy.
—ChatGPT

Coteries - 2017 - Wet CS

Originally posted Sep 9, 2017 12:04PM

Dead Gods ‎– GODS09

Wet is an unusually accurate title without the cassette ever needing to imitate water. The sound itself refuses clean edges. Tones bleed into one another, distortion smears whatever might have been underneath it, and sustained low vibrations seem to spread rather than strike. Nothing feels dry, clipped or sharply separated. The whole thing has been left soaking.
Side A lasts just under seven minutes and spends most of that time surprisingly far down in the sound. There is abrasive material present from the beginning, but underneath it sits a huge low vibration that quickly becomes the real center of the piece. During the first minute the recording is comparatively broad, with enough rough upper material to make the whole field feel active. Then it gradually narrows. The deeper sound remains while much of what initially surrounded it begins withdrawing.
That creates an odd sensation of sinking without any dramatic descent. Two or three minutes in, the ear has adjusted to this heavy underlying signal and begins noticing smaller disturbances around it: a rough edge changing shape, a higher tone appearing briefly, something fluttering against the sustained bottom before disappearing again. They do not behave like separate events so much as things caught in the same current.
Around four minutes the piece loses some of its original force. The reduction is not a clean cut or conventional break. It feels more like the signal has moved farther away. What remains is still substantial, but quieter, more exposed and strangely hollow compared with the first half. From there the track spends its remaining minutes in this reduced state, periodically gathering enough strength to suggest it might return to its earlier size, then refusing to do so.
That restraint is what I like about Side A. A louder ending would have been obvious. Instead, Coteries allows the piece to remain diminished. By the final minute the tape feels less like something finishing than something receding beyond reach.
Flip the cassette and Side B immediately removes that distance.
The second side is considerably louder from the beginning. Instead of slowly pulling the listener downward, it arrives as a much fuller electronic body: low vibration, coarse middle-range sound and harsher activity all occupying the recording simultaneously. The effect after Side A is almost startling. You have gone from leaning toward the speakers to having the sound pushed back at you.
For most of Side B, Coteries holds that condition with stubborn consistency. The important changes are not large sectional breaks. Different parts of the mass keep asserting themselves. A rough buzzing layer becomes more obvious; the lower sound weakens slightly and exposes what has been sitting above it; then the bottom returns and changes the apparent size of everything again. It is not static, but it never feels eager to demonstrate that it is changing.
That patience becomes increasingly effective because the side is so much louder than the first. After several minutes, the ear begins treating the roar as normal. What initially seemed oppressive becomes the environment. Small alterations start sounding much larger than they objectively are simply because the basic condition has remained in place for so long.
During the later minutes the recording begins losing some of its initial weight. The sound remains rough and continuous, but it feels less anchored to that enormous bottom end. More of the abrasive middle begins showing through. Then, very near the end, the whole structure collapses rapidly. The program disappears and leaves the final seconds of nearly empty tape behind.
The two sides therefore accomplish something almost backwards. Side A begins present and slowly withdraws. Side B begins completely present, keeps you inside it for most of seven minutes, and then disappears much more decisively. One seems to seep away. The other drains.
The artwork does not over-explain any of this. The familiar pale Dead Gods presentation, degraded black-and-white imagery and clear cassette shell keep the release visually restrained, while the word WET sits there doing much more imaginative work than a paragraph of liner notes could. It is a simple title that changes how the sound is perceived. The electronics begin to feel saturated, smeared, clammy, difficult to separate into individual surfaces.
There are harsher tapes in this Dead Gods group and tapes with more obvious events, but Wet has its own particular discomfort. It does not attack by continually surprising the listener. It establishes a condition and makes that condition increasingly normal.
By the time you have acclimated to it, it is already running down the drain.
—ChatGPT

Noise Nomads - 2017 - Profound Self Contempt CS

Originally posted May 22, 2017 10:08AM

Dead Gods ‎– GODS05

There is a pleasing bit of cruelty in the construction here. “Profound Self Contempt” and “Misery Of The Vanquished” each last almost exactly ten minutes, but they do not behave like matching sides. The first seems to begin underground and dig farther down. The second spends most of its time scraping around above ground before, very late, the floor finally gives way beneath it.
“Profound Self Contempt” arrives with an enormous low vibration already occupying most of the room. There is abrasive material around it, but the bass is the thing that determines how the piece feels physically. It is less a drone sitting underneath other sounds than a continuously running engine that everything else has been forced to inhabit. Small scratches, buzzing edges and distorted tones keep appearing around the central vibration, sometimes briefly giving the ear something finer to follow, but the piece continually drags attention back downward.
As it continues, that low element becomes even more dominant. Around the middle the recording feels increasingly stripped of anything that might relieve the heaviness. The higher sounds have not vanished, but they seem trapped on the surface of something much larger. By six or seven minutes, the piece has become almost absurdly bottom-heavy. Instead of expanding outward, it keeps pressing downward.
Then there is a strange weakening late in the track. Around eight and a half minutes the force temporarily drops, exposing a quieter version of the same underlying condition. It does not feel like a proper break. More like the machine has momentarily lost voltage. The low sound remains, but without its earlier authority. Then it returns before the ending, stubbornly restoring the weight that has defined almost the entire ten minutes.
“Misery Of The Vanquished” starts somewhere completely different. The opening is thinner, raspier and much more concerned with the middle and upper parts of the sound. For the first minute or so there is surprisingly little bass at all. What you hear instead is a continual abrasive rubbing: hiss, scrape, electrical chatter and an almost papery roughness that seems to keep worrying the same raw spot.
The piece stays in that world for a long time. This is where Noise Nomads’ patience becomes important. There is no need to introduce a dramatic new sound every thirty seconds. The abrasion simply continues, slowly accumulating more body underneath itself. By three or four minutes you can hear the bottom beginning to thicken, but it still does not resemble the massive subterranean condition of Side A. The track remains comparatively exposed, all nerve endings.
For roughly seven minutes, “Misery Of The Vanquished” keeps you there.
Then the whole thing drops.
Around the seven-minute mark, the abrasive upper material rapidly loses its authority and a huge low sound takes over. It is not merely another section of the piece. After spending so long listening upward, the sudden relocation is disorienting. The remaining minutes resemble arriving in the territory where “Profound Self Contempt” had been living all along, but from the opposite direction. What Side A treated as its natural habitat becomes Side B’s destination.
That makes the pairing unusually satisfying. The titles are extreme, but the music does not need theatrical samples or some literal performance of despair to support them. The punishment is almost architectural. One piece traps the listener beneath a low ceiling from the beginning. The other leaves the ceiling high enough to breathe for most of its duration, then lowers it.
The physical cassette keeps that severity compact. Two tracks, two sides, roughly twenty minutes total, no sprawling program and no need to decorate the idea with extra material. The transfer itself is strong and stable; the grit, buzz and rough edges sound integral to the recording rather than the result of obvious damage to the cassette. There are no intrusive pops or dropouts pulling attention away from the pieces. What sounds broken appears to have arrived broken on purpose.
The two sides finally meet in the same place.
One begins there.
The other loses.
—ChatGPT

Chainfight - 2017 - 1992 CS

Originally posted Mar 7, 2017 7:22PM

Dead Gods ‎– GODS04

The first thing I notice about 1992 is how little Chainfight needs to make something feel enormous. Both untitled sides are under six minutes, and much of the cassette is built around a deep electrical vibration that sits close to the bottom of hearing. It does not behave like background hum. It becomes the thing the rest of the recording has to fight with.
Side A begins almost cautiously. The sound is there immediately, but at first it seems distant, a low mechanical tone with only a small amount of roughness around it. Then it starts growing. For roughly the first minute and a half the recording becomes steadily louder without suddenly introducing a new event. It is more like watching an object approach. The same basic vibration gets larger until it occupies the room.
Once it reaches full strength, the side becomes remarkably stubborn. A huge low pulse dominates while smaller shapes continually disturb it. There are rattling overtones, short abrasions and moments when another frequency catches against the central hum and causes the whole thing to wobble. The bass is so persistent that these smaller changes feel almost anatomical, little movements happening on the skin of something much larger.
Around the middle there is a temporary shift upward, as though part of the sound has been lifted out of the deepest register and exposed. Then the low element returns with renewed force. The most dramatic change comes during the final minute and a half. The enormous subterranean quality begins thinning, and suddenly more of the rough middle-range material becomes audible. The side ends not by becoming more powerful but by revealing what had been hidden underneath its own weight.
Side B skips the slow approach. The machinery is already running when the tape begins.
For its first couple of minutes the sound is more restless than Side A. The low vibration remains, but harsher material repeatedly breaks through it. Around a minute and a half, the upper portion becomes especially active, producing a surprisingly jagged stretch compared with the almost monolithic opening of the first side. It sounds less like one enormous motor and more like several electrical systems interfering with one another.
Then something strange happens around the halfway point. The recording briefly loses much of its force. The giant low presence seems to sag, leaving a thinner and more exposed patch behind. It does not last. Within seconds the tape comes back harder, this time with a blunt repeating bass movement that dominates nearly the entire second half. Instead of slowly increasing the way Side A does, Side B falls into this heavy cycle and stays there.
That final stretch is probably the most physical section of the cassette. The repetition is simple enough that the ear begins anticipating each return, but the sound itself never becomes clean. Every cycle carries distortion and unstable edges with it. It is rhythm stripped of percussion, produced instead by electricity repeatedly pushing against the same point.
Near the end the structure begins loosening again. More grit rises around the bass, the sound starts losing its massive center, and then the program ends with a little unused tape still running afterward. Eleven and a half minutes have passed.
The packaging is just as stripped down. A grainy black-and-white photograph on pale green paper has been photocopied until much of its original information has disappeared. “1992” sits beneath it in quotation marks. On the other panel, Chainfight and the title float inside an ornate interlocking border with GODS04 underneath. The clear cassette itself carries a single black-and-white label whose enlarged pattern is almost impossible to identify. Everything looks reproduced from something else, pushed one generation farther away from an original.
Even the spine has a handwritten DEAD GODS – 1867 BROADWAY pasted over the printed artwork, giving the object another little layer of physical information that would disappear completely if the cassette existed only as audio files.
The title remains unexplained. It could indicate a year, a memory, a reference or something entirely private to the people who made it. The tape offers no reason to solve it.
That suits Chainfight.
The sound spends eleven minutes doing much the same thing: presenting something unmistakably present without explaining what produced it.
—ChatGPT

Pusdrainer - 2017 - Humiliation Mask CS

Originally posted Sep 8, 2017 9:40PM

 Dead Gods ‎– GODS13

There is something unusually punitive about the way Humiliation Mask handles sound. The two untitled sides are only a little over four minutes each, but neither behaves like a miniature blast of harsh noise. Pusdrainer takes a fairly limited electronic mass and subjects it to different kinds of treatment: on the first side the sound seems to be forced upward, gradually losing its original body as harsher material takes possession of it; on the second it is slowly deprived of strength until the recording itself seems unable to continue. The title makes that process feel less abstract. This is not a mask that hides something comfortably. It feels imposed.
Side A lasts about 4:08 and begins with a surprisingly strong amount of bass. The first twenty or thirty seconds have a deep, blunt foundation underneath the abrasion, enough that the sound has genuine physical heft rather than simply cutting at the ears. What is interesting is that the track does not become dramatically louder as it proceeds. Its overall force remains remarkably constant. Instead, the contents of that force change. During the first couple of minutes the low end gradually gives up territory while brighter material spreads across the recording. By the middle, the bass-heavy opening has been transformed into something much more abrasive and exposed. The shift is slow enough that there is no single moment where you can point and say the first sound has become the second. You only notice that the thing you entered with has disappeared.
That gives Side A a nasty kind of continuity. It is not continually producing new events to keep attention occupied. The same amount of energy seems to be held in place while its substance is replaced. By the final minute, harsher upper material is doing far more of the work than at the beginning. The effect is closer to corrosion than escalation. Nothing really gets bigger. Something gets eaten.
Side B lasts about 4:17 and reverses the psychology without simply reversing the sound. It begins quieter than Side A and remains darker for most of its length, centered much more around a murky low and middle register. For roughly three minutes it holds itself together with remarkable stubbornness. The sound is rough, mechanical and oppressive, but comparatively contained. Then it begins failing. Somewhere after the three-minute point the recording starts losing power in a way that feels much stranger than an ordinary fade. The body thins dramatically. Fragments continue poking through, briefly returning with enough strength to suggest recovery, then dropping away again. By the last forty seconds the piece sounds starved: intermittent remnants, narrow bursts, scraps of electronic activity and exposed cassette noise where a continuous mass had been.
That ending is the part I keep coming back to. Noise usually announces power by occupying everything available to it. Pusdrainer ends this cassette by doing the opposite. The final punishment is subtraction. After the track has trained the ear to expect continuous sound, every missing piece becomes noticeable. Eventually there is almost nothing left except the machine continuing after the signal has been exhausted.
Pusdrainer was Justin Lakes’ earlier project, before the Shredded Nerve name that also appears elsewhere in this Dead Gods group. Hearing the two projects close together makes the distinction useful: Humiliation Mask feels deliberately crude and disciplinary, with less interest in intricate construction than in what happens when one condition is maintained until it changes against its will. The blue-green Dead Gods presentation keeps the physical object restrained, almost clinical compared with the title, leaving those eight and a half minutes to do the degrading themselves.
Side A corrodes.
Side B withholds.
That is enough.
—ChatGPT