Not surprised it hasn't been mentioned as it's kind of an odd duck (which I'll get into below), but a major favorite of mine for the past few years has been
To Live and Shave in L.A.'s
The Grief that Shrieked to Multiply, on monotype. When I think of a complete art package, this is a good example for me. I've been a fan of Tom Smith's work in TLASILA for years under its various guises and shapes and forms, and this has felt a particular highlight. Years in the making, here's some tidbits that make it interesting to me, and also an unlikely candidate for this thread:
It's not really a noise record, though there are certainly a lot of noisy segments. Like a lot of TLASILA's music, it veers between harsher assaults and slices of just about anything you can think of. It's varied and thus consistently interesting.
But, it also has thematic consistency, as at its origin it's a remix record. After completing TLASILA's
Noon and Eternity (not my favorite due to its more stripped down approach, and also it came after the strange, sprawling but excellent
God and Country Rally, which itself had the hard task of following the epic
Wigmaker magnum opus), for which many guest players were involved, Tom was left with a fair bit of material on the cutting room floor. He assembled this into a separate piece, which if I remember correctly was supposed to be released as well as an extra disc on this (already-long) set, but never saw the light of day, publicly anyway. I'd love to hear this (though this won't likely ever happen, as it is one of many, many projects Tom has been in the habit of announcing and then not completing or publishing... I have a running list somewhere, I'm sure! Usually best not to get too hyped up for this man's works unless it's about to get literally released officially) as apparently it is the main material everyone involved here had to work with.
Which leads me to the other part of this compilation that is a little different: it's a remix project, and the source material is the aforementioned "leftovers" piece Tom constructed, as well as tracks from
The Cortège (which itself came out later) and
Épuration, an album that apparently the Blossoming Noise label owns but has never released! Another bit of frustration there.
So what do we have here? Over 60 artists from all sorts of noisy and electronic music backgrounds, some known and some practically unknown, reworking TLASILA material, in a three CDs + bonus download compilation album that runs over 5 hours! It's massive, very diverse, and a lot to take in.
To add another weird wrinkle to this remix compilation, Tom decided that all tracks on each disc should run continuously into each other, like a DJ mix. A strange choice, annoying to some (it gets hard to pick out who did what even with the running order not being a secret, with so many crossfades, and track lengths not being specified), but makes for one hell of a journey for each 79 minute disc taken as a whole. This is part of what took so long, to assemble all these tracks into a coherent flow, not to mention awaiting every contributor's submission...
Last couple weird things: this was initially supposed to be released on Important Records, but they backed away when the project ballooned from two to three discs, shame... Monotype Rec out of Poland stepped in to save the day. For some reason when this happened, the planned cover art (a painting by the well-known here Rudolf
Eb.er, of which I remember seeing a thumbnail of, and it looked great from what I could gather) was changed to something else entirely with the label switch, which is a disappointment, but the music and noise within remain just as great. It's a compilation I can listen to over and over and always marvel at the range of sounds and approaches by all the remixers. It never gets boring.
