Review: Henderson Richardson “Neither Work Nor Leisure” CD

One 20-minute track of raw harsh noise recorded live in the studio. As with most Voltagestress*r releases I'm baffled as to exactly why this sounds as crude as it does, as it goes beyond the aesthetic value of the lo-fi sound and actually detracts from an otherwise decent composition, but what can you do? In the same boat, the CD-R comes with a weak xeroxed cover in a clear sleeve. This time out most of the art is actually terrible, though I really like the strange feel of the back cover a lot. Thankfully the sound is pretty listenable on this one, so even though tons of detail is lost in the shuffle, there is an atmospheric quality to the piece. It gets a little boring in its persistent use of biting midrange distortion, so 20 minutes might be a little long for this as it's basically the same thing with a few subtle variations throughout. But, at the same time, for this style of relatively harsh, improvisational noise... it's not so bad. Once again I think the quality of this could have easily been made stronger without much extra time, though. D.I.Y. packaging is fine, but that doesn't mean it has to look like crap, you know? Seriously, the cover art is disgraceful. Get rid of that crap, use the back cover as the front image, clean up the sound a touch, put a few minutes of time into putting the label's contact information on there so that it looks more presentable... there's just no excuse for this kind of shoddiness. I don't understand the motivation behind this kind of presentation, nor the willingness to accept it.