The Rita & Is - "..." [Whitechapel - 2008]This is a split between master of wall noise The Rita and brooding ambient/ noise project Is, With each offering up a 20 minute track on a 3 inch cdr a piece. All packaged in a rather nice & distinctive black card folder with a photograph set in like a funeral portrait of an ominous looking lake. The Rita Disk/ track is first & entitled Forced Wet Bedrock. Starting as you’d expected with the Rita the sound is very dense and wall-like attack of fiery static and boiling noise texture, though there’s a lot more movement with the sound than pure wall noise. There this shorting or shifting of a huge steel structure sound that at times almost has a rhythmic quality to it & it keeps appearing with-in the roar for the first half of the track. Strangle too the roar it’s self has almost a sinister groove about it, that surfaces ever so often. The track show’s the Rita keeping his seething and edgy sound yet devolving and growing it too. I can’t wait to hear were he goes next. The Is disk/Track keeps with the water bound theme and is called Benign waters. It opens with an ominous electro loop underpinned by growing dread feedback and drone textures. Feeling to start with like the soundtrack to some micro budget grim and eerier 70’s horror film, but slow and surely the noise background starts to grow in strength and volume overtaking the original loop. Giving a great feeling of stale airless ness, much like been downed I would imagine. Then it kicks-in full force with panicked and exploding noise like the roar of water and struggling underneath. The rest of the track calms down a little performing some brutal yet atmospheric noise folds, burns and panic’s and discordant/ sinster forkings. All in all two great, brutal and sinister lined tracks that nicely complement each other, packed in great and creative packing. This Is the first I’ve heard of both Is and the Whitechapel label and I’m highly impressed with both, with The Rita proving he's still king of his particular brand of noise. Roger Batty
|