Knurl - Acetylphasia (2015)
Knurl – Thoracia (2015)
So you like your Knurl harsh, eh? That can be arranged. You'll probably have to endure several minutes of bright, pointy, drone, but you'll get your harsh. You'll fucking get it. The drone is certainly of the droning type of drone. It drones, for one. It is delivered, in part, by something called the saw blade cello, "an instrument built from saw blades and bass guitar strings". That's the kind of drone you're getting. "Apophraxis", it's called, and given Knurl's penchant for opening albums with the letter "A" there ought to be no surprises.... but fuck, this fucker just... drones... on and on. "Where's the fucking Knurl, you fucking fuck?" Razor thin drone, seething with barely contained agitation. Concentration. Focus. Discipline. ("Thwack!!" forthcoming.) There is absolutely no doubt that a fully-flogged knurling is in the cards but Mr Bloor is certainly dragging things out. I guess this is what one calls drama. Well played, I'll give him that. Ambient utterly divested of warmth, a droning ambiance verging on ear-piercing. Ear drilling. Ear-hole bleeding. Then. The fucking Knurl. Fuck. Fucking fuck. Fuckfuckfuck. Did I mention fuck? Like, fuck. The shit, it is harsh, harsh as. It is knurled as all... etc. Practically crystalline in its piercing harshitudes, crystal clear searing flatline that gradually acquires dynamics if not quite depths. Basically we sit in the frigging red-zone for the duration, ever so slowly unfurling new heights, highs, shrieks, squeals. Steely burn. Metallic blister. Tension at the utmost of peaks, the drilling extremities stretched to their harshingest. By the final offering, "Erytheurism", we are entering pure, white-zoned, scorch of the highest order. A few minutes in and the ear bleed scorcheries are ripping across the spectrum, the loss of control almost palpable, badly abused soundholes sadly out of their depth. In all truth, this need not be inordinately harsh- just turn the shit down. But somehow the temptation is there, as in all the best HARSH noise, to turn the shit way the fuck UP. Just brutal. Utterly. Brutal. Three track titles but really one long, astringent, performance. Patient, laid back. Deliberate thwacking of stringed, metallic, appendage. And with each thwacking, a nod of the head, a grin, an acknowledgement, a permanent hearing loss. A rocketing up- and away! Through the red zone, through the white zone, the punishing bliss seemingly neverending. Neverending story of the king of harsh metal-on-metal oblivion. Fucking Knurl! The man who knew his shit. Too much. Too- FUCKING- much. Beautiful.
The first thing I did when Thoracia popped into the earholes was laugh out loud. Ha. HA HA! This is, literally, an extension of the above commented Acetylphasia. Not just an extension. It's like Mr Bloor pressed the eject button, popped another tape in the deck and declared, "Thoracia, be born!"- without a moment's pause in the actual saw blade cello-ing. Am I complaining? Hell no. When you are on to a good thing, why futz around with a single tape on a single label? So. The astringent taste, before-mentioned, repeats- but is flushed, this time, through a far less "hinged" sense of progression. The hint of drone is there, again, though much more expeditiously scorched out of the system. While I wouldn't say my neck is ready to snap, my earholes are certainly ready to bleed. Are bleeding. Are blood. "THWACK!" Enter punishment. The dialog with whipmaster and whipped. Fade out to wide-bodied "Acidactylation", allow the dense saturations to assuage aural passages thus far degraded to near non-responsiveness. Enjoy the gradual fleshing out of unutterably harsh extremity, heavier fluffily-puffilies giving way to iron-clad screech. Side II, again, pretends subtlety for a brief interval before giving way to a good, hard, thwacking. The artist before the storm. Then it is "Oxysterone" and wave after wave of harsh, razor-sharp, pummeling, if such a combination of words may, by the will of Mr Bloor, exist. Here I am caught in a tightly constricted steel trap, harsh white blasts slamming against coursing, bilious, waves, bruised fists bashing against huge sheets of warped, corrugated, tubing. None of this will prepare the earhole for the finale, entitled "Triphalosteride", which blasts straight into massive conflagration of competing screech, scorch, shriek, etc and so on and so forth. The hinges are off, the puritannical blasting- in. The earholes, quite, fucked. Words like "unrelenenting" seem appropriate, among other unnameable adjectives I probably haven't indulged since Tetramatrix. The only thing that saves the earholes from their final oblivion is the relative brevity of the indulgence. Which is just as well. More of the same would be as welcome as it would be obliterating.
Knurl/RDCD - split (2014)
Knurl, Zyzaxom - split (2015)
Two splits each featuring a single long Knurl and a sprinkling of shorter blasts courtesy RDCD and Zyzaxom. Knurl's "Synchronema" dropped in 2014, but could probably pass for Knurl at any juncture in his 20+ year career. Ponderous percussive thunder inducts a drawn-out series of severely singed shriekings, gentrified by billowing deep-sea currents. The shriekings reach their peak, elongate and commence upon slow, sizzling, earhole blister as deeper shades pool about the floor to net some quite substantive, flavorsome, texture. If I've heard this before it would have been via Pyrolysis, from 2012- if a shade less hectic, more even-handed, realizing the expected brutalities without necessarily resorting to more ostensible, unhinged, hammering. Hammering of sort does present itself, perhaps as a matter of course, but is as often consumed in the swirling echos of lost decibels. So to additional word on Pyrolysis. Pyrolysis featured, in its latter passages, some welcome acoustic breaks, a cruel and churlish deity savoring the meting out of sound thrashings upon the sorry earhole, serving the course with a distinctly punishing aftertaste. The steel-on-steel flavors of Synchronema are just as full in body, but nothing quite so ill-tempered, sheering through well-tempered haze of cochlear heat to furnish a burnished, blushing, glow. Drawn-out teasing elaborations verge on sensual, flirt with drone, plunge the depths of softly-padded abrasion to be found among the vivid hues and multitextured scrapes, ultimately to bury themselves in the lovingly layered caressings of tensile, colon blown, seethe. If 2014's Synchronema flirts with drone, "Apheresis", from 2015, leaps ass-first into an interminable sea of unabashed harmonicaness. Dense enveloping ringings crowd out the metallic sources, drag themselves out to their limits, then pull back by degrees to reveal lusty, steel-tongued lashings poised for damage, hot-breathed, well-lubed underbellows salivating all over a shivering, engorged, throb. This is some of the most physical-sounding Knurl I have encountered, though the choice scrapmaterials are practically drowned in a sea of near overbilge. Flavorsome, yes- at least as flavorsome as Synchronema- and better-produced, the shrieking ear-bleed excess concentrated at its most painful, most piercing. Also to be appreciated: the overall "epic" arc of the piece, as it progresses through its thirty minutes from drone proper through to thunderous, somewhat melodramatic, percussive heave-ho- a somewhat somber answer to the almighty wailing as hammered into the earlier-mentioned Pyrolysis.- to usher in, finally, a climactic, severely pitched, surge back to drone proper. Against all that epic flavor, RDCD and Zyzaxom certainly have their work cut out. RDCD for his part was last heard splitting duties with Toshiji Mikawa. The shit was harsh, harsh as fuck, in fact, but came up a tad undercooked when served with the spaghetti-like depths of the mighty Incapacitant. In this split, with Knurl, RDCD fares rather worse. Sci-fi squealings lurch into whitened electro-rip, flopping at random intervals across a limited channel pan. Principle points are to be scored mainly on rawness alone, but I find myself waiting to return, quick, to the Knurl. Zyzaxom is a new project to me and, as a kind of semi-acoustic sister to RDCD, is immediately more to my taste. Frantic metal-bashing racket pushed into the red, pointed in attack, leaving little room for relent. Scraps slap about perimeter, float in cantankerous, junked, atmosphere. The main criticism would be in relation to depths that are, at best, hinted at, but never explored. Still this is a good general direction, and one that would seem to complement the Knurl. While I do have some difficulty in differentiating among the four submitted tracks, I would say that a little work could set the project on course for bigger and better things.
