Alois Richter — Untitled

This self titled release is the first solo release from French  sonic wall-maker Alois Richter- whose also in the great dream based HNW project The Sandman Wears A Mask. This solo debut offers up four untitled tracks, and over 70 minutes of creative and atmospheric yet brutal wall-making.

The first track comes in at just over the twenty minute mark, and it finds Richter presenting the listener with a constant and battering mid-paced two tone wall of noise.  This first ‘wall’ is made of a tight billowing and battering overrun percussive like texture, and a second agitated yet controlled locked static jitter. It’s a good start to the album,  and over repeat plays it get quite hypotonic and tribal raging in it's feel.  The second track is another twenty minute track and it finds Richter building this very tight and oppressive 'wall' out of low-down looped rumble and jittering brooding static dwell. It really feels like the track is pressing in on you, and thinning the air around you, as well as building the tension up and up.

Track three is the shortest of the four tracks here coming in at just under the ten minute mark, it's also the most original and distinctive sounding of the four tracks too. The ‘walls’ built around this eerier and constantly banging distant ritual drum sound, and this phaser like electro jitter meets static juddering texture. The track has such a great unsettling and brutally psychedelic air to it, and  it sounds like a group of aliens carrying out some strange slowed down voodoo ritual.

Lastly we have track four which is nicely sequence in after track three to give you a nice sudden textural jump. This twenty minute track is built around what sounds like a constantly raging, primal and tribal like guitar texturing thats swarmed around by jittering static texturing. I’m not sure if I’d call this purely HNW; I guess the best description is controlled tribal guitar texturing meets HNW static texturing, anyway what ever you call it, it’s a nice intense end to the album.

So all in all this is a rewarding and creative debut album, which shows once more the great  French based Slow Death label offering up a progressive and originally take on wall-making. Through this isn’t as progressive and unusually as some of the stuff put out by the label, so I guess this would be a nice introduction to what this labels trying is trying to do for those who have yet to pick-up any of the labels releases.