Listened to the box-set from start to finish a good few times now. While finally getting to hear the mythical What's The Difference single, the superior alternate version of Against Ghettos' Fragrant Gardens and all that collaborative material with Lussuria is great, I somehow find myself most drawn to re-listening to his earliest, straight-up harsh noise recordings, meaning the Nadia and Silenced Whore tapes, the Audial Decimation comp track, the RRRecycled tape etc.
Despite this early material sounding almost nothing like the quite unique style of devastated, shredded PE he eventually developed, the atmosphere was there from the very start. Dark noise. Not the product of a scene, but of an attitude and a personal history.
New York or New York-adjacent noise in general from this era had such a strong and inimitable sensibility to it. Yellow Tears, Ahlzagailzehguh, FFH, Prurient, Cowards, K.P., John Mannion... An art school background in service of pornographic, psychosexual impulse. In retrospect, the most important noise of the mid-to-late 2000s and early 2010s was largely just coming out of New York and Finland.
