The Night Soil Men – The Transmission Tape Recordings –
2022 – CDR.
https://www.discogs.com/label/450192-Blue-Spectrum-Tapes
This is an anonymous 11 track
disc that landed through my doorstep this morning. I say thanks to the
mysterious disc sender, I admire anyone that will send me a disc and not expect
an Mpfree review. Tearing the label off for recycling reveals it is from Birmingham.
Birmingham and I have a strange spiritual connection being from Coventry and
having a bleak Goth past there (92-93, Death Cultures at the Hummingbird, the
Institute and the Mercat pub).
My boombox gives off lots of
unidentifiable crackle and rumble, the levels vary across each track, I feel
that I am somewhere that I don’t know and never will. A female vocal sample
comes in as if reporting from another time. I can’t make out what’s been said
as it is a slightly muffled field recording, I feel transported into the
listener’s past through their VHS collection. Rumble and crackle return to take
me elsewhere for a time. When the sample of a female narrator returns, I feel
as if I am being told a story as the voice is warped, I can’t make it out, but
it feels cosy. Passages of distortion return, crackling away as if struggling to
stay on the recording, feedback pins it all down. At times the distortion is tied
in with recordings of conversations or noise of the surrounding environment,
offering a brief lucidity that fades as the distortion covers what is
happening. The feel of being haunted appears in the later part of the recording,
making it feel as ghostly. Music at the
end does all the things I described in one.
Sometimes, to be sent somewhere
else recording is a treat, experiments that function to push us to other places
are unexpected surprises.
Army of One @ Coventry Soul 2022.
No comments:
Post a Comment