Servant Girl Annihilator - Soft White Damn [Lost Light Recordings - 2016]Soft White Damn offers up two slices of brisk, battering, and seared walled noise from Texas Huston based Servant Girl Annihilator. The release came as either a C47 tape, or a deluxe, ltd & now sold-out box set that took in the C47 plus a 3inch CDR with an extra track, and lastly a digital download from the labels website. This project is the more wall-noise focused venture of Tanner Garza, who is part of infamous noise jam & Richard Ramirez Black leather Black Leather Jesus. Plus a handful of other collaborative & solo projects, that see the sound move from darker ambience, drone, industrial inspired noise & beyond. I can’t say in the past I’ve been biggest fan of Servant Girl Annihilator, or Mr Garza other projects, but from time-to-time, I’ve enjoyed his releases and Soft White Damn is one such situation.
I’m reviewing basic stand-alone tape version, which came in edition of ten copies, and as of writing, this review copies are still left. The plain white tape comes in a single-sided black & white sleeve, and inside this, you get a black & white sticker featuring the labels logo. The sleeves art working is fitting a grimy collage type affair, which takes grainy shots of different brick walls.
Though the tape is a C47, the two tracks each coming in at just over the fifteen minute mark. First of these is “Dannydannydannydanny”- this ‘wall’ consists of three or four layers of similar toned lower-to-mid ranged noise, which are focused towards roasting, sweeping, and billowing textures. The pace of the whole thing is rather rapid & searing in it’s feel, and each texture is seemingly moving slight out of sink all to create a fixed yet churning ‘n’ grinding mass of sound. The whole thing has quite a crude industrial vibe to it structure, and I really enjoy the whole crude & scuzzy feel of the wall.
The second track is entitled “I Am Sorry”, and really to start with this is seemingly made up of the similar, or identical textures to the first track. The differences is the pace of the whole thing, which is pushed up in speed, to twice that of the first sides track. And at times the textures seem to almost pile & blend into each other, but this never full happens as the you can always just make up the different pattern make-ups. By around the sixth-minute things have slowed, stretched & pared-back somewhat, and you now get a blend of a choppily spinning tone, which is gliding in a mass of searing white-out. This setting remains for the rest of the track.
So all in all I rather enjoyed the scuzzy, simple, yet effectively crude feel of this tape , and would say it’s some of the best work I’ve heard from either SGA or Mr Garza in general. Roger Batty
|