The overwhelming form of music has been “busy.” It’s kind of dumb to start a review of a tape in a hyper specific genre with an extremely general sentence about the nature of form in music, that may not be true. Look at minimalism, which is supposed to be devoid of business, listen to how much sound is there, how little space there is. The solution seems simple to make “new” music then, be less busy. Well, that’s a bit like the harsh hackers who are responding to the blog-O drone thing going down and calling it “smart.” Let’s get down to brass tax, the album is busy, really busy. Like ten genres in as many minutes, but only one track.
The tape starts off with a beating sort of cheap hip-hop beat. Grinding white noise snare-style snaps and concrete blasting bass working in and out going forward with great mass. Mild ding-y sounds breezing through out this tempered beat. The piece quickly moves into sharp bass-y hits and all sorts of metal clanging. Occasional little clear delayed mellow lines come in and at different parts beats return. The sounds are all in a narrow little area of acoustic sort of metal clang and clear delayed lacquered spits. There are gnar grind sounds and some more pretty sounds, but they all exist in there own little world, that is not really strayed from. This is not to say these sounds aren’t difficult and odd. Despite the use of sounds that have a common metal workshop kind-a vibe, there’s a density to creation sounds that is confusing and intriguing, there is also a certain thinness to other sounds that one would not expect and the lack of something to grab on to sonically, gives all the more pause to meditate on these choices.
These thinness sounds are highlighted at the end of side of one with a slow minimalist bass line of sorts being played –can you call one note with alternate timbres a bass line? These sounds are laid bare in the kind of first week of doing weirdowood music, just bought a delay pedal kind of way, but there is an incredibly odd thinness and vulnerability to these sounds that is confusing. It’s hard to find different angles on the sounds and figure out quite what is interesting about them, but something is incredibly striking in there tone and they way they are placed next to each other.
The sounds are difficult and confusing and hard to deal with, so one has to listen over and over to get it. The busy-ness is the other re-play factor. The rapid change between perceived genres and placement of sounds and slight change in these sounds that compounds with massive structural shifts, makes this tape very hard to get a handle on. After every listen there is a sense of missing something, isn’t that what new sounds like?
