| Imagine a vacant slaughterhouse, chunks of putrid flesh left dangling from suspended meat hooks. Locked in an old refrigeration unit, shivering and confused are Prefuse 73, Alex Paterson from the Orb, the members of Tortoise, Trent Reznor, Saul Williams, Hakim Bey, and Tricky. Packing the tools of their trade, they make music to stave off the hunger that gnaws at each of their bellies, eyeing each other ravenously as they build manic, cacophonous crescendos, harsh loops of disjointed feedback, and then fall, exhausted, into sinister, droning, ambient soundscapes. Sometimes snatches of lyrics break through the ominous buzz; here and there a breakbeat makes an entrance and then quickly retreats into a delay loop, consuming itself as the players fall upon each others' frigid bodies with forks and knives. They bang on the walls. Their vocal chords too frozen to shout, they wheeze and whisper their plight through the fan duct. On the other side of the vent, John Cage hums to himself and records the whole thing into a decrepit analog 4-track that eats tapes, turning a deaf ear to the musicians' plight as he adds dissonant plunks from an electrified cactus to the mix. William Marshall, the vocalist/programmer mastermind behind Octavius, captures a sound akin to this, only far more frightening, on Audio Noir, his Mush Records full-length debut. Incidentally, none of the artists mentioned above appear on this disc, nor is their presence necessary. Marshall's work is unique that it approaches a rock/hip-hop/electronic amalgam with little to no regard for driving beats. Instead, the beat becomes a supporting character in an exquisitely twisted abstract narrative. Audio Noir tempts you to lose yourself in its subtle intricacies at the same time it knocks you off your feet with tsunami-sized waves of blaring sound. The result is a tense, aggressive and surprisingly beautiful album that dares you to define it as hip-hop. - Signal to Noise |
2XLP/Out Of Print