Goosebumps - Welcome To Dead House [Vagary Records - 2013]Goosebumps is new project from Oregon based Ques C who is known most for his dense, detail & intense Wall noise project Wet Dream Asphyxiation. This new project is a HNW tribute to Canadian TV kids drama show of the same name that dealt with supernatural & horror fed going on’s . The Goosebumps TV series run between 1995 & 1998, and it was a horror anthology series that was aimed at older children & pre-teens. The TV series was based on the popular series of Horror & supernatural books by American children’s author R. L. Stine. This first release takes it’s title & cover artwork from Stine’s first book in the Goosebumps series of books “Welcome To Dead house”. The tape sleeve features a full colour reproduction of the books cover, and the cassette was a jelly green c50- I’m reviewing a promo copy of the release, so I can’t really comment much about the artwork, etc. Taking up the first side of tape we have the track “Dark Falls”, which is the name of the town from “Welcome To Dead house”. The “Welcome To Dead house” book & TV series episode followed the story of Amanda and Josh Benson who move into a new house in Dark Falls, where the residents are all ghosts who have died while living in the same house and are preparing to make the Benson family one of them, as they need blood to survive. The track starts off with a sample of the series theme tune, and then we get a snippet of dialogue sample from the TV episode with Josh Benson character moaning about moving to Dark Falls. The ‘wall’ kicks-in at the one minute thirty mark, and offers up two or three juddering & churning noise tones that sort of spread out around you in a loose yet dense mat of sound. As the track progresses you can make out more active billowing & jittering sub-tones shifting & baying with in the mass of the ‘wall’, but these never really seem to open-up the airless & almost sludgy rush of the track, and at times the ‘wall’ makes one feel like their stuck in a mass of gooey molasses (or a sea of grey sludgy ectoplasm). Around the 13 minute mark this reverberating wave or churning starts to snake it’s way through the ‘wall’, and this nicely suggest supernatural activity building & sway the foundations of the ‘wall’ & dead house it self- but still the ‘wall’ remains like a vast sticky mat of spider web engulfing you in brutal yet slightly playful noise- this churn darts in & out for the rest of the tracks run time, and also towards the end of the track I can make out a swirling white noise grains with-in the 'wall' too. On side two we have “It Will Just Kill You”, and this starts out with a deep creepy voice welcoming you to the dead house, asking you to check under your bed, and tell you to make sure if you make friends you find out if their dead or alive first!. The ‘wall’ kicks in at just under the thirty second mark, and it’s a pummelling & rapid mixture of juddering-on-wooden-train tracks noise with slightly billowing static grain noise rush. To me it brings to mind taking a ride on a abounded ghost train as a winter wind whistles & bays out side with a repetitive intensity. The ‘wall’ has quite a muffled ‘n’ aged feel to it, which causes (at times) the tones to nicely blur together. Once again there are some shifts with-in sub-tones present here, but these seem a little less defined & clear as than the first track, though at times the sub-tones do get quite violent & whipping implying the canvas that surrounds the ghost train is rapid buffeting & shifting as you pass it on your after midnight ride, or the ghost train is getting faster & faster on it’s woodern tracks.
Neither track really departs much from Ques C's work with Wet Dream Asphyxiation, as both tracks are dense yet sub-layer shifting examples of intense walled noise making. Yet there is certainly a more playful & ghoulish under lay here, compared with the brooding & at times puzzling brutality of WDA. All told “Welcome To Dead house” gives the listener two submerging & entrance slices of walled noise- I very much look forward to hearing more from this project in the future, and see if Ques intensifies the playful/ ghoulish under lay of the projects ‘walls’. Roger Batty
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