Sleep/Gluttoness - Untitled split [Self Release - 2011]This great c30 tape brings together a side a piece from two creative yet very distictive sounding Canadian & USA based HNW projects. Side ones taken up by relatively new walled noise meets ambient HNW of Sleep from Winnipeg, Canada. And side twos taken up the BBW obsessed HNW project Gluttoness who are from Fairfax USA. The nice bright looking orange cassette tape comes in a homemade cream coloured sleeve which features a stuck on old sketch of a naked women sitting on a mans face- it looks like it might have come from either some 18th century sex manual or dirty drawing book. The sleeves spine is hand written in grey felt-trip, with a small sheet of white paper inside the sleeve listing the tracks lay-out. All told it's nice, lo-fi & quite personal looking, yet perverse bit of packaging. So moving onto the tapes sonic contents and on side we have a single untitled track from Sleep, which takes up most of the side of tape. The ‘wall’ on offered here is of the slow, murky, muffled and crumbling variety, and it conists of a rumbling ‘n’ stirring muffled bass ribbed static tone that’s weaved with sleazy, wispy yet fairly active slicing judder tones. To me the track brings to mind been slowly pulled down a mountain inside a huge barrel, and some one out side the barrel slashes it over & over again with fencing swords- a strange mental picture I know but that’s what it sounds like to me. The contrast between the two tones is very captivating, and you really do get sucked in more & more as the track progresses. For the most part this 'wall' remains on a fairly similar sonic path through-out, with some slight layer shift here & there. All told it’s another appealing slice of walled noise from this new project, and once more it nicely captures a place somewhere between HNW & ambient HNW. Over onto side two & we have the Gluttoness side of the split. On offer on this side is four piece suite of HNW tracks which seem to focus in on a very stern BBW mistress; as through-out the four tracks we get samples of the same female smothering her male victim under masses of flesh and shouting. The side opens with an 30 second intro track which is a mixture of churning & malevolent tunnel noise, & slowly back 'n' forth industrial like texturing. Next the mistress says “ shove your face in my arse” & then we drop into first “What To Do (How To Do It) ”, then the wonderfully entitled “Assmask” & lastly “She Loves The Torture”-theses three tracks follow the slow & subtle evolution of thick, billowing & rumbling noise textures. These central textures are under-fed by a selection of buried and circular yet sludgy industrials texturing that takes in distant clunks, machine judders, ect. Each track really feeds into the next to create this slowly & subtle shift with in the ‘walls’ as at times the ‘wall’ seemingly thins back or doubles up. The only major change with in the ‘wall’ happens in the last few minutes of the tape, as the mistress comes back into to say “I like to torture” then the ‘wall’ kicks back in with a more rough & battering feel, and these really odd sort of processed & muffled vocal textures can be heard. On the whole this is one of the more hopeless and overwhelming works I heard from the Gluttoness project, and I guess it perfectly fits the theme of a unforgiving & very weighty BBW mistress. So to sum-up one of this is one of the better, creative & rewarding split HNW releases I’ve come across this year. With both parties offering up great & consistent slices of their own individual takes on walled noise. Well worth tracking down a copy if there any left. Roger Batty
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