Soft Issues.

Soft Issues – Soft Issues – Opal Tapes – LP- 2019 – OPAL147-12.

https://opaltapes.com/album/soft-issues

https://softissues.bandcamp.com/

     1.    Crawl Backward.

     2.    Pelt.

     3.    Bate.

     4.    Personal Sewer.

     5.    Pallid Mess.

     6.    Bleak Magic.

     7.    The World Of.

     8.    Grave Whip.

     9.    Hart Let Update.

    10. Ruin the White Walls.

    11. Spun Out.

I’ve heard the name Soft Issues floating about for a while, upon looking them up, I have found out they are a duo from Leeds UK. I’ve become a lot more open to ‘Noise with beats’ through the work of Aja Ireland, Salford Electronics, Consumer Electronics, Cremation Lily, etc. All the French stuff like Tetsuo and Abyyse has also blasted me open to this. So, I am going to take a closer look at this which is the second Soft Issues release after an EP in 2017.

The opening track Crawl Backward demonstrates some impressive shouting, the vocal is impressive and has an angry quality. The echo and faltering give way to some choppy, juddering cut up noise; the vocal becomes a background noise to as the digital juddering takes the lead. As thing progress there is some fun bouncy, large synthesiser noises in place, the vocals remain cut up and inaudible; they are frequently overtreated to become noise – at other times they are audible. The vocals have the effect of being somewhere between irritating and innovative, I feel vocal treatments play a large part in the project – it’s a strength.

The beats have variety, sometimes they judder and pulsate, at others they are a temporal addition that fades away leaving the noise to play out. The electronic noise is generally sharp and obnoxious – this often works at an energetic – frenzied pace. There is a consistent urgency to the noise that builds to high levels of anxiety raising hell at different times and I like the use of pulsating noise a lot, it’s playful, sometimes relentlessly repetitive. There are some impressive uses of high-volume pulsations, sharp noise and raging vocal, Bleak Magic is a strong example of this. I’d like to see how this pans out in a live context.

The Word Of, seems to go elsewhere by pulling everything back and allowing harmonious drones to do the work as sounds go off in the background. Slight noises tweak off in the background. This is a real break from things until the urgency comes back tenfold, I feel the album’s tracks are sometimes just demonstrations of violent urgency, but done in different ways.  

The description of this is a load of hypey pap on the Bandcamp. In my view this is just a good, forward-thinking noise album. Good, strong, work that remains consistently interesting through its’ own wide variation of approach.

Choppy Noodles 2019.

Humanextermination Project / Crepuscular Entity

Album: Humanextermination Project/Crepuscular Entity

Artist: Humanextermination Project/Crepuscular Entity

Label: Basement Corner Emissions

Catalogue no: BCE #26

Tracklist:

     1.      Humanextermination Project - naturemarchtoextinction

     2.      Humanextermination Project - mechanizedbloodpump

     3.      Humanextermination Project – crucible

     4.      Crepuscular Entity – Transgressed Evolution

This four-track EP (I suppose you’d call it) caught me completely off-guard, in a good way I hasten to add. I’ve encountered Crepuscular Entity before – in fact I recently reviewed their Harmfulmelodics album for this blog and I don’t think my brain has quite recovered from having all my synapses and neurons seared into oblivion. More on CE’s contribution later, as I must concentrate on Humanextermination Project’s utterly genre-defying take on what noise music can be.

It’s not the flesh-‘n’-bone vapourising blast of unmitigated chaos but instead something that’s very much difficult to translate into words. ‘naturemarchtoextinction’ finds the listener slap-bang in the middle of some twisted rainforest full of mutated creatures, singing out their hearts from the treetops in a mad high-speed warble. It’s strangely enchanting, unnervingly so, and in spite of that I wouldn’t like to catch myself anywhere near wherever this exotic locale may be. It feels like it was inspired in part perhaps by The Island of Dr. Moreau, with the addition of a generous helping of off-the-scale hallucinogenic fungi just to add something ‘interesting’ to the mix. In fact, the following ‘mechanizedbloodpump’ is probably the comedown after imbibing all those mushrooms: an extended hyper-dysrhythmic convulsion while the toxins riding the tube-trains of the blood vessels try to find an exit from the nightmare.

And so on to HeP’s third helping, ‘crucible’ – industrial machine crunch and disjointed rhythms showered by a rain of Vulcan’s fireflies, metal scraping on metal, axle-grinders like giant flywheels unleashing sharp-toothed fury and fire, the lava of molten metal spitting and sizzling like some cornered beast. It may not be ‘traditional’ harsh-noise/power electronics but it’s just as intense and supersonic in its own untrammelled and unconcerned way. It doesn’t care whether you like it or not, it just barrels its way through like one of those massive tunnel-drilling machines but speeded-up to 11.

I was also surprised by Crepuscular Entity’s immensely listenable ‘Transgressed Evolution’ – starting via a single irritating high-pitched whine which then goes on to evolve in all sorts of interesting ways, with layers of abstract and industrial machine-shop-like noises piling up on top of and crushing each other, churning and roiling in a Bessemer furnace of immense proportions, black smoke belching thickly into an already diseased sky, until it reaches the apotheosis of dissolution, annihilation, disintegration, and bodily discorporation. This is both nuclear fission and fusion all in one.

This, if nothing else, proves that noise as a subgenre of industrial/underground music still has much to say and so many ways to say it. I’ll have some more of this please.

Psymon Marshall 2019.