UNTER.TON review of Corrupted Geisha
"It's pure coincidence, but Londoner Natalie Wardle has created the right music for these turbulent times. Because as VHS¥DEATH, she has also come up with something very confusing - and that is absolutely positive. Basically, it brings back a style that has led a rather shadowy existence in recent years: sampling. The five songs on her current EP "Corrupted Geisha" consist mainly of naked rhythm frameworks, around which she sets set pieces of different sounds and conversations. The collage style of their clay art structures, which refuse all common song schemes, sometimes make them surreal and disturbing. When, as in "Snakes In The Grass", menacing Hammond organ whistles and monotonously scraping guitars begin, the scenery even tilts into the nightmarish and becomes almost as horrible as an executed exorcism due to the pitched voices. VHS Death experiments with electronics and incorporates occult ideas. In the end, there is a rather short musical pleasure (after a quarter of an hour the whole haunting is already over), but it should hardly have been longer, because Natalie demands you unduly and her demanding Nachtmahr compositions tug at the nerves and make you uncomfortable. But doesn't music have to hurt sometimes? After all, VHS¥DEATH manages to stay in the memory with her EP "Corrupted Geisha", precisely because she is so different, so uncomfortable and so radical in her sound aesthetics. A strong number." http://www.unter-ton.de/4-22--vhs-death,-acht-eimer-huehnerherzen,-rome-is-not-a-town,-mfmb,-stella-diana---die-musik-spielt-weiter.html
