Burn Ward "Self-Immolation" 3" CD
[Ghost King]
This is the debut release for this new label, and possibly for the project as well, resulting in an insanely brief one-track "business-card" CD-R that clocks in at less than five minutes of harsh noise with sort of a middleground recording quality that's not lo-fi but does have a sense of ruggedness to it.  It's kind of a standard approach to abrasive distortion with little or no layering, though some of the warbled and twisted movements do sound a little different from the norm.  At one point everything drops out to almost total silence and you can hear some random background noises, but then it spits right back into a cavalcade of swirling noise with a few panning effects to add a little bit more detail to the track.  The final minute or so, which uses the most panning and layering, is definitely more in your face and effective than the first chunk of the track - ending with a quick couple of lines of harshly screamed and distorted vocals (of which I can't decipher a word).  The disc is painted black and housed in a plastic sleeve glued to a piece of board that has a lot of thick black paint applied to the back.  Inside the plastic sleeve is a tiny insert that includes the pertinent information printed in black on very dark gray matte paper.  Overall the packaging leaves a little to be desired, but I've always been a fan of an emphasis on black like this, and for a D.I.Y. affair it does work.  This isn't bad, but it's impossible to get a real feel for the project based on one track that's so short.  I'd like to hear where the vocal work will get taken down the road, so maybe future efforts from this project will be a bit more revealing? (6/10)
Running time - 4:49, Tracks: 1
[Notable tracks: there's only one]
Ghost King - http://www.existest.org/ghostking.html

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