The Prowler - Self Titled [Worthless Recordings - 2012]This self titled c45 tape offers up two twenty minute plus slices of dense ‘n’ brutal walled noise. The release & the project are themed around the 1981 slasher movie The Prowler. The Joseph Zito( Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, Invasion USA) directed movie told of a masked killer, wearing World War II U.S. Army fatigues. He stalking a small in New Jersey town bent on reliving a 35-year-old double murder by focusing on a group of college students holding an annual Spring Dance. The film featured a fairly original & creepy looking by Tom Savini. The cassette case artwork features full colour/pro-printed single sided sleeve that takes in some of the movies poster artwork. After a bit of a searching around the net it seems that this is the projects one & only release thus far. Also there is no indication of who's behind the project & where they come from. So we have to let the sonics with-in speak for themselves….and boy do they do that! The tape features two side long & untitled tracks, and the first sides track is a dense assault on ones sonic sensers, with a thick & unflinching mixture of billowing ‘n’ slightly throbbing low-end noise drone that is cross-cut by thinner fixed jittering sweeps of static & a slight rattling tonality. The track is truly engulfing yet the mix of textures make this an brutallly enchanting ride, as your mind gets locked into first one then another noise tone. The ‘wall’ here is relatively fixed, though there did seem some slight alterations as the track progresses, and these take-in: the billowing/ throbbing element getting more whiped-up & raging, and the rattling/cluttering element getting more pressing & intense. Also the textures seem to start to meld/ melt into each other to a certainly exten; but of course that could all just be a trick of the ‘wall’. Flipping over to side two & we have another intense & overwhelming bit of walled noise. This ‘walls’ starts off been built around a constant low-end rumble that’s played over by a mass of thinner jittering static tones- to me it brings to mind an unrelenting rain/ hailstorm heard from under a thin Perspex roof. As the track progresses the rumble certainly seems to grow & intensify; maybe suggesting a killers victim being carried half dead down in a underground storm drain. The tracks certainly is a little more fixed & simple in it’s state compared with the first track, but it somehow seems to get more intense & battering the longer it goes on as it hammers down wave upon wave of walled intensity noise on you; yet also under this hammering brutality is this sort of constant subterranean dread
This opening shot from this rather mysterious project offers up two consistent & entrancing slice of dense & brutal walled noise. With both tracks offering rewarding & atmospheric textural detail. Roger Batty
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