Angel Of Everyone Murder — Self Titled

This is a double cdr set, on Kovorox Sound; with three long tracks on each disc. The sounds are the work of the esteemed Lea Cummings, best known as Kylie Minoise, and two companions: Fergus Lawrie and Sarah Glass. In brief, each track sits in hazy, noisy, guitar drone territory; and from this somewhat basic palette, Angel Of Everyone Murder fashion six pieces that are the same but different.

The shortest track is fourteen minutes long; the longest, twenty-three - this should give you an indication of what to expect. There’s no great changes, developments or shifts in the overall sound; just solid, consistent pieces of focussed guitar drone. Focus is a key word here, with the trio rarely wandering from the course they start off on; and also in the sense, that the trio’s roles can’t be easily prised apart on the recording - the constructions of the drones are focussed and compressed.

The tension of the tracks is often maintained by a feedback tone or two; these run thru many of the six pieces, though on “Rainwater Powder” they combine to produce a particularly heavy wall of tones - it has a similarly oppressive feel to some Thomas Koner recordings. On other tracks, Angel Of Everyone Murder use rhythms: “The Town Where The Girl Falls From Five Skies” has an insistent beat supplied by a guitar, “The Garden of Death Fragrance” has a cautious rhythm based around a very processed drum machine or a guitar loop and “Child of Nameless Time” is built around a repetitive bass riff, which the guitars swirl around. Where devoid of rhythms or clear feedback tones, the tracks are often held together by sheer noise alone - “The Night When It Cannot Cry Does Not Cry” is a shrill mist of simmering treble and interference, drifting malevolently until it collapses into fast-moving, feedback wail.

The order of the day, here, is indeed guitar noise - crackling, clanging, fizzing, singing, scraping guitar noise. It fills every track from start to finish. The effect is rather reminiscent of the early years of Sonic Youth, if they had fully branched away from song-forms. “The Garden of Death Fragrance” sounds closest to this vision, with trashy, percussive, junk guitar and the droning of a thousand fluorescent tubes - a very eerie listen. But for all the amplifier abuse, there are trails of melody too - the riffing of the final track, solicits sympathetic picked notes from one of the guitars; whilst the end section of “The Town Where The Girl Falls From Five Skies” has twangy guitar, tailor-made for the bleak aftermath to the most feral western ever…

For all the talk of noise, this is not an incredibly abrasive duo of discs. The tone is more often unsettling, or dark, than outright violent; but, at the same time, these are not “clean” drones at all. They are jagged compositions of cacophonous guitars, not straight-line, minimalist drones: rather then being abstract sound artists, Angel Of Everyone Murder operate at the extremes of “rock” music; and all the better for it.