by Bryan Berge

Area C
Darkens the Mind
Sloow Tapes

An uncharacteristic double-sided job from Sloow this time around—must be a special occasion on account of the first tape from Providence’s finest looper, Area C. On "Darkens the Mind," Area C—known to God and government as Erik Carlson—demulsifies his elegant, hyper-processed drone work on Last Visible Dog into a rougher mixture fit for both the fried generation and the sound art set.

The A-side, the eponymous “Darkens the Mind,” opens with raw guitar tone—pitched and tense but nothing too PSF—that is gradually chopped, stretched, and looped into glistening sound taffy. It gets a bit too gooey in places, but one can’t but admire the patience with which Carlson builds his compositions. Cut the tonal massage, and you’ve still got yourself a good twenty minutes of subtle, disconcerting music.

The B-side, titled “Quickens the Heart,” delivers lighter fare than the moody A. Unfortunately lighter reads as less substantial in this context, and while that makes for excellent mood music, it doesn’t hold the attention for the duration. Any single three-minute stretch herein, however, should clear the head nicely after a stressful day.

But be ye noise maven or top 40 junkie, you should take the opportunity to check out Area C’s beautiful website. Carlson has some serious design credentials in his background, and the website has enough bells and whistles to boggle the eyes for a few minutes.

Colossus/Locrian
s/t
Heavy Nature

Round 2 opens with another piece of smooth drone, by Chicago’s Locrian. “Visible/Invisible” opens promisingly, with the distant intonation of a bell tower offsetting softly falling curls of guitar. But the open space is quickly plugged by bass grumble, and the guitar goes from gentle to guttural as Locrian ascends to the drone plateau and stays put for a good fifteen minutes. The duo covers a fairly wide harmonic range and certainly puts their pedals to work admirably, but I personally could’ve done for a bit more of the simpler, clearer work featured earlier in the peace. Once their trajectory became clear, much of the tension drained.

New Hampshire’s Colossus adorns the B-side with roughly more of the same, though honestly that can be said about the entire genre, and it need not be pejorative. His side is wisely broken up into two pieces, with the first—“Act of Light”—aiming for the same star clusters inhabited by both Area C and Locrian. Colossus works with some stellar loops and calls it quits before the cosmic blah starts feeling like a cheap payoff.

The second piece, “Drink Deep,” begins subtly and features ace field recordings, but it reaches its zenith a bit early, and the sustained harmonium (or harmonium-like, positive identification being a real bastard in this kind of recording) tone eventually loses its luster. But just as this segment wears thin, it ebbs into a soft buzz, which softens further into synthetic calm and silence. I’ll be keeping an eye on this project, as Colossus demonstrated a good ear for timing, a rarity when your work can just as easily last fifty minutes as five.


Wether
s/t
905 Tapes

Several hours spent immersed in aquatic drone left me feeling a mite prune-y, so I was craving something leaner and meaner for this last review. The name Wether rung a bell from prior releases on No Horseshit and Peasant Magik, and—piecing together the deeply suppressed memories that lingered from those tapes—I had an inkling this offering might divert me from the numbing beauty of the two tapes above.

It takes all my powers of understatement to call this a change of pace. Wether battered my ears, deploying the standard no-fi noise tricks but channeling them into immersive looped structures that held my mind in rapt captivity. The first side is rhythmic fusillade of gruesome, almost Mammalian beats, paired with violent high-end snaking from the Merzbow/Astro axis. In contrast to other beatnoise death marches, Wether evolves his patterns with sloppy exactness, as if his equipment were breaking and coming back online at regular intervals. Eventually the entire mess putrefies into a brief squall of shout-spiked power electronic, but it thankfully locks back into its hypnotic writhing quickly enough.

The shorter and even more savage B-side dispenses with the structural niceties and delivers undistilled, overblown sludge. Heaving loops surface from the feedback plumes, but they disorient rather than anchor, and the whole piece affects the ears like a kick to the temple. A ponderous silenceabruptly cleaves the side—either to separate pieces or re-sensitive the pain threshold—before Wether unveils a throbbing sheet of rust to send us off to our nightly nightmares. I’ve been damn grumpy about noise lately and this passes my smell test, so true heads will probably piss their jeans.


please submit any tapes to be reviewed to the regular Foxy Digitalis address (attn: Bryan Berge). Thanks.