Structured Disasters cassette and download
Encased in an unadorned cassette box, with no insert nor sleeve to guide us, this debut cassette from Aylesbury’s Structured Disasters label documents a brace of live engagements from veteran doom-improv-noise outlaws Plurals. Recorded in Brighton last year, this is pure-blooded no-audience underground gold – dense fields of sound conjured up from a stockpile of equipage including guitars, synths, tape machines, objects, various reeds and assorted stringed instruments.
January At The Cowley Club – note the utilitarian title, nice – is the A side. An oleaginous synth hum slowly burps out into the universe, a vast galactic whale, basking in the solar rays as a lattice of wheedling scuffs and noises grips persistently to its rubbery carcass. Brittle, metallic clatter gets gradually louder and the throbbing pulse turns into an agonized howl, vast choir of feedback, oppressive in its physicality. Even on this grubby-sounding tape, it sounds like some heavy shit, the long slow waves of sound seeming to get louder and denser, a slow motion replay of a city under bombardment. Finally, after what seems like years of sonic oppression, the bass evaporates and we’re left with an afterecho of formless hubbub.
September At Campbell Road Studios is even more immense and ritualistic. Beds of drone, like wide and abstract planes drift gradually across one another, their raw, feedback-y sound reminiscent of the gaping howls of Neil Young’s Arc-Weld. Imagine a Crazy Horse mono-drone cannoning around your frontal lobes. Forever. Occasional wordless vocals add a touch of psykick devilry as the momentum gathers and the mighty gales of noise seem to tear a rift in the space-time continuum, bringing forth all manner of ancient horrors, old gods driven insane by millennia exiled in the void, ready to wreak mighty fucking vengeance on those who banished them there.
In his house at R’lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming. No longer.
+++
+++
We need no swords 
1 Comment