Disthroned Agony - Vol VI [Phage Taoes - 2010]“Vol VI” offers up two very different sides of sonic work from this prolific, extreme noise and experimental Minneapolis based project. Side one offers up a very tight and rewarding slice of thick jitter bound wall making, and Side two an building & layered slice of experimental sound- scaping. So first-up is of course side one, and it's taken up by ten minute untitled HNW track which is built around a mid-paced, interlocking, fairly simple but effective mesh of jitter bound static tones. Disthroned Agony unfolds his 'wall' in a nice tight, disciplined and thick manner over the ten minute run time. And it’s a very moorish and rewardingly engulfing ‘wall’ that does have some quite nice hacking subtones going on from time to time in the tracks wall of sound, yet it still keeps it’s persistent presence in place for all of the tracks playing time. Over on side two we have another untitled track, but it’s very different from the first sides 'wall'. I guess the tracks best described as loop based and layered experimental sound-scaping with some quite seared edges. The ten minute track is made up of building layers of alternating and often quite speed-up sound textures like: bird like twitters, tape un-reeling tones, spinning machine wheel tonalities, high pitch radio churn, and buried radio voices. By the two and half minute mark drifting and juddering radio harmonic tones start appearing in the mix; and over time theses start to take more shape and harmonic definition with almost a swooping and unwell 1920’s feel to the swooning stab of the tones. Then just under the seven minute mark things turn a lot more noisy and searing, as everything is fed into clouds of feed-back, yet the track still does not lose its playful charm. It all ends in slow monition radio tone dips before fading out. So “Vol VI” is a tape that offers up two very different, but equally rewarding sides. I very much look forwarding to hearing more of this projects work, because clearly there’s a great understanding here of both the brutally of sound and how to constructed clever and thoughtful experimental soundscapes too. Roger Batty
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