I'm not familiar with this minimal project but the group seems to have released quite a bit in the last year, and this lengthy release is a pretty good piece of somewhat varied experimental noise with a focus on slight ruggedness and minimalism. A lot of consistency and repetition are used overall throughout individual tracks, but it rarely gets really stale. "Astral Torture" mixes raw ambient sounds with reverberant percussion; "Cull" is louder, but not too aggressive, using a bunch of jittery electronic blips and busy, wavering tones; and "Saliva" is a bit more minimal and generally revolves around incredibly thick, dense bass rumbles with some foreground sounds that kind of sound like carefully scraped stringed instruments. "C4 in Their Hackey Sacks" is the first boring track (not to mention the first to have a really lame title), basically using a couple of layers of strange overloaded distortion for 11+ minutes, resting somewhere in the middle - not calm, but not confrontational. The 16-minute "Dreaming About Diamonds" is similar, but a bit darker and more ambient at the start, slowly building in volume and starting to creep in on overloading the output levels to faint distortion. Closer "Asphalt" is my personal favorite, maintaining a consistent throb of ambience throughout alongside a slowly panned set of "chirps" that lend an eerie undercurrent to the composition. I like the fact that the recording is smooth but not too pristine, because it adds a certain effect to the material that makes sense, but doesn't cause any problems. The CD-R comes in a hand-numbered sleeve xeroxed in dark ink on thick stock. Inside is a similar booklet on equally thick paper, and all of the artwork is fairly abstract and contains some hard to read text and geometric shapes. The strongest tracks herein speak volumes, whereas the actual bulk of the disc ranges from not so bad to fairly boring. I'm not annoyed or totally disinterested though, so all in all it's got some promise.
[House of Lies]
Running time - 50:16, Tracks: 6
[Notable tracks: Astral Torture, Asphalt]
House of Lies Recordings - http://www.houseofliesrecordings.org
