snatched reality: scott mckeating on deathwank, platemaker, inseminoid, colossloth

February 6, 2014 at 9:07 pm | Posted in new music, no audience underground | Leave a comment
Tags: all dead tapes, colossloth, deathwank, george proctor, inseminoid, lee stokoe, new music, no audience underground, noise, peripheral records, platemaker, rob woodcock, shybairns records, sufferinfuck, tapes, tide of iron, vilenoise, wealth of abuse

Deathwank / Platemaker – Find Ahmed (business card CD-r, Vilenoise, 06, edition of 50 or download)

Inseminoid – The Whitest Eye (tape, Wealth of Abuse, Wealth of Abuse 02)

Colossloth – Anchored By Lungs EP (download, Peripheral Records)

Scott McKeating, RFM’s mysterious third voice, twiddles with the focus on his microscope and invites us to see what he’s smeared on the glass slide.  Over to Scott…

—ooOoo—

Aside from briefly shocking work colleagues that have no previous experience of the harsh noise or no-audience underground, the name Deathwank has several other functions for me. Their chosen name is an indicator that this is a band I’m probably going to end up avoiding in future and it’ll be a project that’s its hard to take particularly seriously. There’s something just a little too ‘look at me, ma!’ in a name like Deathwank (Editor’s note: true, but some of their track titles are pretty funny: ‘YOUR MUM AND DAD ONLY FUCKED ONCE AND IT WAS SHIT’ is comic genius). A side project of sorts for members of Scots grinders Sufferinfuck making an unhealthy noiserockpunknoise (or as they’ve labelled it “noisecore scum grind”) racket, the act’s single track here is so lo-fidelity that it’s just a nudge away from collapsing into harsh noise wall. With little but the vocals (I think I’m hearing two vocalists screaming like Cuckoo’s Nest detainees but I can’t be 100% sure) and snatches of rhythm straining through the brick-thick sonic soup, it’s a fairly one-dimensional sound.

In all honesty I’m instantly more inclined to like Platemaker’s offerings on this business card CD-r (Editor’s note: the whole split release totals just four minutes, physical object sold out – see download links below), pretty much just because he’s not called Deathwank. For those that need to know the who and what, Platemaker is a solo “workplace grievance related noisecore” project from Tide of Iron’s vocalist / drummer Rob Woodcock. A frenzied three-pack of balance assailing tracks, this kitchen-based fury is a din risotto of live drums, noise blasts, programmed beats and treble screams; a super fast spew from the service industry that would rather take a big shite on the customer than season their dishes.

Inseminoid (Lee Culver and George Proctor of Mutant Ape’s dronestaticnoise duo) have been reasonably quiet of late, so this cassette is a welcome sight on the release schedule of Gareth Howell’s (Sump’s drummer) new PE/noise label Wealth of Abuse. This back-to-business outing begins with crossing sonic pulses and dusted down 80s VHS soundtrack melodies forming underneath the pair’s signature static thunder. Despite their stationary aggression, an Inseminoid listen demands headphones. There’s too much going on under the gale to risk losing it in the rumble of public transport or the interruptions that contact with humans can bring.  Overheard melodies are almost tentative in the mix of sound, the handful of notes (subsequent listens suggest they were made using a shite keyboard rather than broken samples) rapidly become part of The Whitest Eye’s Alvin Lucier skew. The fleeting snatch at reality these elements represented is eventually reduced to a near whiteout by the trademark Inseminoid slow rise to noise.  The deal is sealed – another extraordinary release.

Buried deep in the city of Leicester, Colossloth is a one man experimental project that isn’t easily tagged with a sub-genre. Wherever people end up deciding where the music fits, the recent Anchored By Lungs EP is a definite success in stitching together abstractions. At three tracks and around ten minutes long, the EP is more a signpost than a release (although it is an actual release, download only at the moment though). The title track might well be a very musical piece, but its still slough dredging heavy. Crawling along like Sadako on a broken pitchshift riff from the MBV archives, ‘Anchored By Lungs’ is a clash of clean and scarified, a ‘real’ violin line saws through the loopage. With death moans in the track’s recipe, accompanied by creaks and desolate piano, it’s a bit Nurse With Wound-y in the best possible way.

The broke fairy tale vibe continues into ‘Welcome Home Mourning Voyeur’ – some kind of adagio for creaking floorboards or creeping-troll-incubus on the bed springs.  There’s a genius loop (created? Randomly found?) of a revolving weathervane of percussion noise, spinning at the tip of the forthcoming storm. The track isn’t all abstraction though, there’s a tasty Sabbathian electric guitar squall in there. ‘Feint Hearted’ also features guitar, possibly sampled and removed from its usual world, and angularly spelunked in a bed of manipulated bleepage and circuitboard sucked squelches. An Argento mood permeates this piece, plucked string and piano horror atmospherics add to the darkness. Colossloth is also a better name than Deathwank.

Deathwank on Bandcamp

Platemaker / Shybairns Records on Bandcamp

Vilenoise

Wealth of Abuse via All Dead Tapes

Colossloth / Peripheral Records on Bandcamp