Concrete Threat / [Untitled] - Split [Unlimited Drift Recordings - 2011] | This C30 split brings together two HNW duo’s- we have Sweden’s Concrete Threat, & their brutal/ overwhelming take on the genre. And Texas’s [Untitled], & their more primal & ambient walled noise take on the form. Each project offers up a side long piece of ‘wall-making’ here. On the first side we have Concrete Threat track which is entitled “Incineration”. This project started back in 2006, and they have always offered up a bleak & unrelenting take on the HNW form. The project conists of Christian Fagerström & Hannes Hellman (also of Chloë- a unsettling HNW tribute to Hollywood teen actress Chloë Grace Moretz). Sadly Concrete Threat called it a day in early 2013, so this is some of the last released work by the project. The track on offer here is a mixture of taut bass bound juddering ‘n’ locked billowing, which is brutally weaved & seared by juddering thick yet tight waves of churning ‘n’ ripping static. It feels like a cross between a looped earthquake & a looped tsunami that keeps roll & battering over you again & again. Around the five minute mark a few other slight more cluttering juddering ‘n’ jittering sub-tones are added to the ‘wall’, and these have a unforgiving noise old school industrial bleakness to them; through this track still stays very squarely in brutal walled noise territory. While there are a few more subtle shifts along the rest of the tracks length, this really just stays very brutal, unforgiving, pretty unmoving & battering through-out
Over onto side two, and we have a untitled track from [Untitled] (!). [Untitled] is the moody & bleak HNW/ ANW project of Richard Ramirez (of Werewolf Jerusalem, Black Leather Jesus, Fouke & many other projects) and Sean E. Matzus ( of Last Rape, A week of Kindness, The Whitehorse, Black Leather Jesus)- the projects been in existence since 2011, and has so far released around eight releases taking in CDRs, splits & compilation releases. The track on offer here I guess is best described as somewhere between HNW & ANW- it’s built around a fixed billowing ‘n’ blunt raging judder that is underfed by a weird swirling sort of crypt or cavern type atmospheric hiss ‘n’ crackle. As the track goes on the judder seems to become less violent & more muffled around the edges, as if the ambient texture is smoothing down it’s surface. Yet the track never full drifts or pans out, as it stays just in HNW territory . Again this is another effective side of tape, but in a lot less violent & battering way compared to the first side of tape.
To sum-up this is a worthy split that offers up one violent & inescapable slice of walled noise, and one more atmospheric & bleak slice of HNW/ANW crossbreeding. Roger Batty
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