Two rather old CDs compiling some stuff made by a great guy (in a musical sense; I don't know him). Let's compare them while drinking supermarket bought Karhu 5,5%!
THE CHERRY POINT - Night of the Bloody Tapes CD (Troniks)
TCP are often mentioned as one of the godfathers of the sub-genre of Harsh Noise Wall, along with Vomir and The Rita. At least on this album, it's pretty clear why. The recordings compiled here are massive, rumbling, dizzying, rabid and powerful pieces of violence. The sound resembles in many ways some of the better mass-producing HNW artists - think Sleep Column/Elephant Graveyard, Necrotic Fissure and so on - but it has the advantage that it has not yet become quite consumed by gimmick/scene and the idea of sounding static just because that's what you do. On Night of the Bloody Tapes, even with the next-to-absolutely-massive wall sound, The Cherry Point has more in common with the Treriksröset/Sewer Election Killing for... tapes than some random dude calling his HNW Java Generator wavs dirty names. There are lots of things going on, and while this may be more of a barbed fence than a literal wall, we all know that the important thing is whether it gets the job done. This does. A fucking awesome album - somehow grown up, for all its minimalism.
THE CHERRY POINT - Black Witchery (PACrec)
And now for something completely different. This compilation has very little to do with the HNW genre founding shenanigans of Night of the Bloody Tapes, and sounds very different indeed. I'm sure there are all sorts of chronological and factual reasons for this, but I won't spend any time researching any of it. For I am strong, black woman. Anyway: this is a way more free-roaming take on industrial noise and rapacious feedback. There are electronics, there are effects, there is something wet and unpleasant dripping down your spine. Roomy reverbs made less roomy by their obvious nature of being synthetic, but then made more roomy again by the addition of multiple strange layers... I wont try to explain too much, since I am now officially drunk. What I will say is that of the two Cherry Point albums discussed here, the former is certainly the most in-your face, and probably my favorite, but Black Witchery may be the more subtle or even "more intelligent" one. "Season of the Witch" (the third track of the latter album) stands out by combining both worlds and introducing some brutal looping bordering on lo-fi PE among the fidgeting experiments, and thus making everyone happy. It's great. In fact, The Cherry Point as a whole is (/was???) pretty great.
To sum up: intelligence gets you fired, brutal HNW gets you laid. Black Witchery is the superior compilation of TCP material on a technical level, and one that will probably grow on me, but ATM I'll pick Night of the Bloody Tapes most of the time.
