Culver & La Mancha Del Pecado - Collaboration 5 [Narcolepsia - 2015]Here’s a collaboration between to between two respected, troubling, and uneasy drone projects. Culver is the Tyneside based project of Lee Stokoe, and has been active since 1995. And La Mancha Del Pecado is all the work of Ciudad Juarez, México based Miguel Perez, has been active since 2009- both projects are fairly prolific( as solo artists & collaborators), and as this releases title suggests this is the 5th time the pair have collaborated together. The releases comes in the form of a single sided C80 tape on perverse ‘n’ disturbing Portuguese based noise label Narcolepsia. The cassette sleeve takes in a single sided grey card cover, which features overlaid & rough cropped images of the same female face. It comes in an edition of 80 copies, and as this only came out in late Feb of this year, you should still be able to get your hands on a copy. This is the first collaboration I’ve heard between the pair- but have heard a more than a few of each projects other releases, and I’d say this sound wise is pretty much what I would have expected, and I don’t mean that as a negative- it’s just both acts have a liking for taut, airless, and uneasy drone matter, and that’s exactly what we have here. The tracks built around two or three layers of muffled & distance sustain- maybe these were once organ or keyboard tones, but now there completely washed out. These tones are fed out into a stark & grey mass of un-harmonic simmer/muffled roast, which seems to be both airless & barren, yet at the same time hovering & glowing in it’s layered yet extremely hazed sustain. At times you think you can maybe make out some sort of subtle shift or harmonic tinged with-in the mass of grey sound- but really I think this is just your mind trying to find some form of hope to hold onto in the ultra pressing stark-ness of it all. I can’t say I can see myself playing this often, as this really is drone at it’s most hopeless & barren, but that said there is something kind of strangely appealing about the track when your in the right sort of nihilistic frame of mind. Roger Batty
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