Awenydd - Private Live 2025
Cassette, self-released, 2025. Edition of 20 copies.
This tape by the Dutch project Awenydd features a live and rehearsal recording from 2025, and lasts for about 35 minutes in total. The sides offer a differing combination of bleak industrial sounds gnawed by tactile and earthy harsh noise. If you read the
Awenydd interview published in November on the SI website, this is the self-released live/rehearsal tape mentioned in the interview's end.
The live side starts with a slow pulse of gritty and murky rumbling that's coupled with a broken spoken sample. Right away I'm wondering how this was captured and how much post-processing was involved as everything sounds damn tasty! The slow-paced low-end drones are deep and vast, but not boomy. They're coupled with wailing tape ambience and crudely broken rattles of what I assume to be scrap metal noises. Some irregular thumping is heard in the background that sounds like a sped-up heartbeat or some machine mechanism. It has movement and variation but remains dark and uneasy throughout. It grows more intense over time by dropping out the rhythms' silent breaks, but even then it feels restrained or at least controlled instead of overwhelming. In the end the rumbles fade and the side ends to looping tape warbles and rings of metal hits. Instead of dull fade or cut-out it tones down and mutates tastefully.
The B-side's rehearsal was recorded some monts after the gig. It's a great combination of vast drones and highly tactile sounds, and has an atmosphere that grabs you right away. The scrapes and rumbles sound like something slowly digging its way up from the soil. The side's based on heavy ambient drones, metal hits, and muffled vocals that grow from spoken to something more hoarse and ominous. Compared to the live side there's less build-up here, it's more of a steady crawl of grit and desolate drones that eventually sound like ship horns in a fog.
According to discogs this tape's limited to just 20 copies which is a shame. The dubbing's done really well, and so is the tape's visual side. Instead of a regular j-card it has abstract black texture graphics pasted on each individual panel of the pastic case. The cassette has similar see-through stickers of grit on it that you need to cut holes in for it to be played, which is kind of annoying but admittedly looks good. The cardboard j-card's exterior is blank yellow on the outside, and on the inside there's more murky textural mass and the recording dates for each side.
Edge Of Decay & Kitu - Nocturnal Dolours
Cassette, Narcolepsia, 2024. Edition of 80 copies.
This tape is a collaboration of two Finnish noise makers that are active in live and recording settings under these and a few other names, with YANA and Vigilantism perhaps being the best known ones. The tape lasts for about 35 minutes in total. It's a pro-dubbed tape with excellent bio-mechanical artwork by André Coelho that suits the sounds and even goes beyond them.
The A-side's sole track starts with a mass of electric rumbling with intervowen metal sounds and clearer flanger sounds. This mixture of rough harsh noise and cleaner and more experimental pedal noise could be said to be a combination of the main EOD and Kitu elements in a very straightforward 1+1=2 manner, and while it's by no means bad, I think its beginning is the least interesting part of this tape. The track soon becomes a more vivid mixture of harsher and, perhaps not playful, but more clean and warbling sounds. The combination is harsh industrial noise. The track doesn't really change style, rather just evolves and mixes the same elements more interestingly.
Side B starts with a more abstract mesh of quite boldly suffocated flanger-ambient whirring and semi-muted junk noise screeches. A lot is happening on a more abstract level, some rhythm appears, and the track slowly grows more intense by gradually letting the sounds breathe and clash more freely. The final track is the shortest and feels to be between the earlier two. It's a mass of rugged harshness that gets some more controlled, clean and rhythmic electronic sounds intercept its seams and making it something new and more powerful. As the slow-paced drone rhythms and hectic metal object sounds clash, the tape ends on a both calm and intense note. The tape has remained captivating for quite a few listens already, and seems it'll remain so for many more to come.
Edge Of Decay - Haute Couture
Cassette, Freak Animal Records, 2024.
In the distro description of this tape, Freak Animal advertised the works of Edge Of Decay as harsh and blunt noise. That remains a fact here, as what you get is highly distorted sounds of junk metal abuse paired with equally crude pedal harshness. The tape also employs various types of warbling and phasing effects to create some cleaner but also more disorienting sounds amidst the rugged wreckage. The sparingly offered slow metallic ringing in the tape's title track and closing track is particularly tasty. Someone could call this industrial harsh noise due to the effect choices and the heavy presence of metals, but I'll leave that splitting of hairs to others.
The tape's four tracks last for about 35 minutes in total. The individual tracks are compositionally fairly straightforward pieces of harsh noise, so one should not expect them to offer any major twists during their run. They start by choosing a style and direction, and remain on the same route for their length. That said, they're active and vivid instead of monotonal, and all the tracks are clearly different from each other, so this is not some one-dimensional affair. It's rugged, but with clear characteristics.
I have no idea what's the idea behind the tape's title and the vintage fashion photos. Edge Of Decay doesn't really have a set aesthetic, but even in that context the graphics feel odd. Then again, at least they're confusing in a way that makes you notice the tape.
Bookwar / Hideshi Hino - Noise Party XVIII
Cassette, Extreme Noise Tape, 2022. Edition of 20 copies.
This spray-painted tape comes packaged in an also spray-painted table spread box, with info prints glued on its flat surfaces. The paint chips off quite easily from the smooth plastic, but despite that, this is actually a pretty cool looking package, and it's not much bigger than a regular plastic tape case either. Two big thumbs up for using recycled materials and for the general DIY attitude.
The tape features about 15 minutes of material per project. First on the split comes Bookwar, a Russian hiphop-punk-noise project. The main chunk of their recordings here are live clips. The first of them is based on lathe cut loops creating minimalistic crackling ambience that gives a surprisingly calm start for the tape. However, the next song is much more hiphop-spirited and features vocal performance in the associated style, although its raw and unsteady sound and overall rough delivery doesn't let it wander too far from noisy realms. This and some other tracks quite prominently featuring Russian vocals makes me miss out on a lot of their content, but the industrial-vibed hiphop thumping and varying types of rough and minimalistic noise experimentations are alright to hear even without understanding the words. While my interest in hiphop in general is close to nonexistant, I'd like to hear a Bookwar release that would offer a more focused selection of his instrumental and abstract experimentations. As it is, the split's side is more like a sampler of the different things the project does - and as it got me interested to hear more, it must be labeled as successful.
Hideshi Hino is a director of some notorious gore/exploitation films. However, THIS Hideshi Hino is actually a noise project from Poland, ran by the same person who also runs the Extreme Noise Tape label. Their sole song here is a tribute to the short film "Something To Tide You Over" that was published as a part of the 1982 anthology horror film Creepshow, which remains the only un-comedic role I've seen Leslie Nielsen in. The song starts with simplistic piano patterns and other synth ambience that's bows quite clearly to '80s horror/thriller films, and the wooshing waves fit the song's theme well. It's been years since I watched the film so I don't know if this section uses samples from it or if it's wholly the artist's own creation. I was assuming it'd be a a brief intro before some noise kicks in, but aside of the song's slightly distorted sound contributing some noisiness, it sticks to being cinematic vintage synth ambient for some minutes. I think those minutes were the song's best part as well, as after this kind of a cinematic and dramatic build, the following very minimalistic and fairly quiet synth tone rumbles don't really cause an effect. It makes sense in the film's context, knowing how it ends, but as a separate song it feels underwhelming. I do like the clear thematic and cinematic focus, though.
