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Monday 15 March 2021

Scum – Life Sentence

Scum – Life Sentence – CD – Aussaat – 2021 – Aussaat 14.

https://scumcumcum.bandcamp.com/

https://www.facebook.com/Aussaatundernte/

http://www.damagedcorpse.com/



For Life Sentence Japanese Harsh Noise unit Scum delivers 9 tracks of contrasting, choppy, chaotic cuts. Scum is the sole project of Sou Inomoto who has been releasing under the Scum name since 2010. The artwork on Life Sentence is by Françoise Duvivier who has been creating amazing, nightmarish visions from France for decades, her artwork is worthy of individual inspection.

Label Aussaat is no stranger to Harsh Noise, they have the French perspective from Brutalists Entre Vifs and the American take L’Eclipse Nue that actually started in Tokyo bringing and regurgitating the influence in a new form. Aussaat seem to select good noise acts and do proper CD releases with them as opposed to Cdrs or tapes.

The tracks on the album operate at a high speed, sounds evolve by cutting each other up with collisions and overlaps. There are sharp jolts of sound that punctuate passages of noise, cuts and drops break the movement of the sound into other directions. I like the erratic interruptions that seem to make way for eruptions that have no similarity to what has gone on before. Hisses are broken by buzzing screeches, that are then chopped up so that their flow is broken, feedback cuts through all of this. As the sound bottoms out and new tracks start the process over again, with new variations and methods demonstrated across the album.

The works often function on a partial capacity so there are impressive, detailed sound interactions at the lower levels and this will then gradually and sometimes suddenly rise to a fuller capacity. The slower build ups allow for a lot of change in the sound to happen during this time. Life Sentence’s strengths lie in the quieter areas haunted areas that resonate bleakness and how they contrast the busy areas that give the feeling of being a passenger during a high-speed drive along a motorway.

Army of One 2021.

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