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Triple Negative, God Bless The Death Drive (Penultimate Press, 2020)

I’d been thinking about this record lately. I’d bought it on a whim in the Summer, and after listening to it a lot for a month or so, the Triple Negative LP had fallen to the back of the pile as I kept accumulating new purchases. And I missed it. So when I saw it in some year-end best-of list (things I peruse riddled with anxiety, thinking I suck for not having listened to enough music this year) I immediately went to the shelf and put it back on the turntable.

Triple Negative sound like a radio playing in a comic book. Fragments of sound pop up like fishes’ mouths in a pond of static and tape hiss, sometimes speaking the language of a 1930 Greek folk standard, or of tortured muzak mixed with trance-like chants and the sound of banging on metal, or of a sweet ballad for voice and a weary, huffing organ.

It’s one of those impenetrable sort of records, one could only tentatively connect it to a vague atmosphere, a Russian novella feeling, a quiet, composed sort of tale of black magic, the nautical theme of the comic on the record’s sleeve only adding to this impenetrable narrative fog.

Having been recorded on tape over the course of 15 years, God Bless The Death Drive sounds like layers of dusty recordings on top of older, dustier recordings. Tape loops, winds, things that squeak, grind and squall interact with muffled vocals, guitars, and percussions building trembling, precarious songs that are as unpredictable as fascinating.

I wasted a lot of your time on GRRAWR trying to understand why I enjoy free, abstract music, and there isn’t a real reason, at least not a fixed one. Maybe today I feel like listening to God Bless The Death Drive because I want to be challenged. Or I want to close my eyes and feel like I’m on a ghost ship, floating on a sea of tape glistening with shards of punk sensitivity. Or I just feel like annoying my partner. In any case, this is a challenging, freeing, puzzling and inspiring record. Dive in.

Click here to listen to God Bless The Death Drive on Bandcamp.

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[genericrecordreviews]

Komare, The Sense Of Hearing (Penultimate Press, 2020)

This is not for everybody. Or any time. If you thought the music of Mosquitoes was indecipherable, brace yourself for Komare, a project involving two of the three members of the aforementioned band with an even more minimalistic, abstract and puzzling sound.

The ideal setting to experience The Sense Of Hearing, I guess, would be a sensory deprivation tank. The idea being that, as the title suggests, you would rely strictly on your sense of hearing to enter a completely alien world, probably similar to a fever dream or a particularly dark psychedelic experience.

While listening to this apparently meaningless mishmash of pulsating drones, electronic squeals and primitive, inarticulate voices in a daylit room, one might even find it occasionally funny. The two sound like children playing around with a couple microphones and various machines, breathing and clicking their tongues and mumbling and speaking gibberish over layers of static.

At the same time, there’s a whole different dimension to it: the idea of reaching the very source of sound and communication, a primordial soup of bubbling electronic chaos, taking away every foothold and letting your brain roam free between alternate universes. When the last, epic excursion between hissing blades of sound and distant calls on side B ends, you’re left confused, with a tangy taste in your mouth, as if you’d been licking a sheet of aluminum for the last forty minutes, and a new appreciation for the wooden, earthly warmth of music. It resembles an intense DMT trip, where the real sense of bewilderment and awe comes after the experience, when your brain starts processing reality normally again.

Like I said, it’s not for everybody. It’s a journey, an exploration and a reflection on the chaos that is life on Earth. It may also just be two people having fun with the raw materials of sound and I may be forcing meaning onto something that has none. It may be what we do all the time with everything. If everything is fiction, might as well take a trip into the grey, barren, but unique landscape of Komare.

Click here to listen to side A of The Sense Of Hearing on Bandcamp.

Follow GRRAWR on Instagram to get a record review every Wednesday in your IG feed.

[cordycepsspore]

(Penultimate Press)

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Joe McPhee, Bryan Eubanks ‎– My Undocumented Alien Clarinet #penultimatePress 2017 UK Alto Clarinet, Synthesizer [Roland MC202 Micro Composer Synthesizer] – #JoeMcPhee Electronics [Open-circuit Electronics] – #BryanEubanks