sinusoidal perpetuity: jo murray on depletion, shareholder

August 10, 2015 at 12:10 pm | Posted in new music, no audience underground | 1 Comment
Tags: depletion, fairfax industries, graham stewart, grant smith, joe murray, know your enemy, martyn james reid, sandy milroy, shareholder

Depletion – Null Data (tape, Fairfax Industries, X101)

Shareholder – Jimmy Shan (tape, Know Your Enemy, Know 14 or download)

Depletion – Null Data

Welcome to the throbbing darkness, the suffocating embrace…

Depletion is the new name on the Gateshead UK Noise Scene.  After playing a handful of explosive shows in and around Gateshead this is (I’m pretty sure) his first tape, a C40 round-up of studio-jams and violent, shattering experiments.

Rather than play HNW theatrics, Depletion puts the emphasis on creating distinctive sound dynamics; each micro-passage focussing on a sort of robotic breathing (in-out, in-out), cracked aluminium lungs wheezing or the tides battering dry shingle.

At times the wire-wool phlegm rattles inside the steel ribs all loose and bouncy, at others thick, rusty blood is pumped through a leaky rubber hose making dark red pools.  You dig?

And the more I listen to this tape the more the whole ‘body electric’ vibe fits as a listening strategy.  This is wholly electronic music but it is pulsating with moist, filthy life.  The metallic strain heard in some pieces apes stretched muscle sliding over white bone, the flushing hiss of steaming electronic interference sounds exactly like my hot rush of piss first thing in the morning.

Taking this deeper and deeper I’m reminded of the way microbes waggle their sexy flagella – the swooning fizz, tape loop crunch and high-pitched whine circle in imperious sinusoidal perpetuity.

Presently I pick up a musky erotic sheen over the dirty bubbling.  One of the longer jams makes like fat raindrops smacking hot neon to fizzle saucily on the floor below.  Phew matron!  Eventually I lift myself out of the gutter to find I’m rocking gently to some classic Musique concrète, industrial machinery backfiring and black-alien squelch.  S-w-e-e-t!

This healthy DIY release is limited to 30 copies so be sure to call Fairfax Industries to sup direct.

Shareholder – Jimmy Shan

Sandy Milroy’s Shareholder project has been covered in these flickering electric pages before.  Back in 2013 Shareholder was a one-man project of smeared tape collage and fuzz/grunt-guitar.  This spanking new tape, delivered squealing into the world in June 2015, is no solo-mess but a three-man assault squad dedicated to muddling heads with their deeply narcotic chops.

As a whole sonic document Jimmy Shan is a delightfully fucked-up set of songs played with heavy intensity through the most blown-out and shredded amplification modules around giving everything that rehearsal-room, sore-throat R-O-A-R.  Taking the power trio into a Dead C-space you’ve got Sandy Milroy on gruff-guitar and vocals, Grant Smith on kung-guitar plus the acid-interloper, Graham Stewart, slapping those loose traps.  Playing together they are simply bristling with sooty vibration, booming with ravenous echo and chugging steam-train propulsion.

The opener, ‘Previous’, takes the pause between descending guitar riffs as it’s backbone, revelling in the deep valley of static between each mountain of fizzing, obnoxious, coal-tar strum.  As we climb higher up the Cyanean Rocks tumble and splinter leaving us stranded in a bruised and battered rain cloud ready to let rip like Zeus heshed-up on petrol fumes.  Flinty is not the word.

Make way for seriously Altered Images man! Slumped pop music breaks at all the wrong angles on ‘Doctor was Dad’ , the bad-karma energy captured in the off-kilter power trio (exploding guitars held together with iron drums) and crafted into a whirling ball of hate-crackle, shrunk small enough to swallow.  The stomach juice leaches the poisons leaving vanilla sweetness, the damp sherbet lemon stuck to your pocket lining.

Like the aforementioned train ‘Devours’ rattles into a heart-stopping “Wah! Wah! Wah!” ending as hefty as any of Kurt’s “Yeah, Yeah… Yeah” shenanigans.  And with no time for respite side one ends with a no-wave piece, ‘Decent’, the guitars a little lighter but woven tightly together like Aran cable.  The cheeky wink to Bob Bert’s tom rolls is the blood-red icing on the flesh cake.

My eyes feel heavy in their sockets and my hair crackles.  Phew. I’m not sure if I’m ready for side two just yet, so intense is the experience, but I press on in the name of No-Audience Journalism.

‘In a Stale Room’ opens the next side, the trebly strumming shakes with the unmistakeable wobbliness of a Dindy Super in an almost confessional mode – James Taylor through a boombox condenser mic!

‘In Braille’ shimmers like a heat-slick making me think of the most extreme moments of the Vermonster back catalogue when they seemed to be just goading each other into more and more dramatic fuzz-boxed ecstasy.  At 11 minutes this is the longest song here and makes good on every second, drawing out the skunk-edged riffage, coming on like a paranoid rush.

The emotional closer ‘Didn’t Want to Stay’, parties like god-damn Crazy Horse man with that slow deliberation dripping off each fucked-up/fuzzed-out chord and tub thump. Boof… bap… bap… bap… boof – the boxy drums punch through the black-molasses shunt of the twin guitars.

Goose me!  Booking a Bar Mitzvah?  Text the Shareholder boys and tell ‘em Posset sent you.

—ooOoo—

Fairfax Industries

Shareholder