Anonymous — Dresden
For those unfamiliar, between February 13 and 15th 1945, allied forces dropped 4500 tons of high explosive bombs on the German town of Dresden, killing an estimated 25,000 people. The bombing was an utterly destructive and, as many historians have noted, completely unnecessary.
Dresden offers 12 hours of static HNW, but not without some subtle shifts and changes to the discerning listener. It’s hard to say whether these shifts are the result of Anonymous tweaking his gear throughout the course of the release, the natural interaction of the equipment, or my brain getting completely lost in 12 hours of wall noise. Regardless, I don’t get the impression that Anonymous just sets up his walls and then goes off to watch football for an hour waiting for enough material to record for a disc.
Disc 1 fades into a wall that is built around a burley, boxed-in rumble and a buzzier static tone. It’s heavy, thick and pummeling. I say “boxed-in” because the dense, low-end rumble sounds like a destructive explosion contained in an impenetrable vessel. It’s a force can’t be unleashed, so it continues to smolder and barrel along within it’s inescapable confines. As an opening salvo, it certainly paints a picture of smoke plumes, bombs exploding, and buildings ablaze. Pure audio destruction!
Disc 2 features a slower rumbling wall. Thick and dense, a low end juddering is definitely the most defining aspect of this wall. It sounds like a muffled, roaring fire. It’s far more subdued and controlled than the former track, with only a hint of higher-end static crackle being smothered underneath thick noise plumes.
Disc 3 sounds like beefed up radio static chopped up and choked off. There appears to be slight variations in tempo and speed. Whether those variances are a result of periodic tweaking or is simply the gear doing their thing is a mystery to me. Perhaps a little of both.
The 4th disc is thinner sounding compared to the first 3 tracks, which were very bass driven, low-end rumbles. This wall is built around a rapidly spitting geyser of static fuzz, all jagged and broken up. Without being buried underneath thicker, bassier noise, a lot of crispier static tones really shine on this track. It’s definitely one of the strongest pieces of the set or at least stick out the most to me.
The 5th disc sounds somewhat unremarkable to me, at least in comparison to the previous 4 tracks. It’s aggressive static fuzz driven wall making. It certainly has a ramped up white noise-driven vibe. It’s competently crafted, though lacks certain definable, distinguishable characteristics the former walls presented.
Disc 6 layers warm, static fuzz with a repetitive sputtering tone. The sputtering tone, sounds like a slow moving oscillating fan (perhaps it is). It’s quite ambient and meditative, probably more in line with ANW, though the lines of demarcation between HNW and ANW can be a fluid one indeed.
Disc 7’s wall is based on a rapidly repeating bass-heavy juddering and an equally rapidly revolving line of broken static. The static almost sounds corporeal, like tangible objects being repeatedly broken in rapid succession. Over the course of an hour, the two lines collide, each fighting the other for prominence. At times one sounds seems to eclipse the other, yet again, is subtle-shifting truly taking place or is it the trick of wall?
Disc 8 is a low end noise crawl, made up of a moving mass of thick static rumble. As the mass churns along, digital-sounding artifacts spit and sputter off. This was another piece I was not quite as fond of. It was balanced enough, but again kind of unremarkable in the grand scheme of things.
The 9th disc in this set presents a fast-paced aggressive fuzz tone with a rapidly revolving buzz sound bobbing to and fro. At times it sounds like an amplified coffee grinder, with just a few stray beans rapidly knocking back and forth inside the plastic enclosure. Disc 10 sounds like a combination of a roaring, crackling campfire and a spherical mass of static energy, slowly rolling down in descent.
The penultimate disc sounds like a slight variation on track 5. The final disc pairs an aggressively revolving static pulse with what sounds like a repetitive high end rattle. If for no other reason than variation, this final track leaves me with a more rosy picture of this set in it’s totality.
A few weeks back a friend asked me what I was up to for the weekend. I told him I had a 12 disc, 12 hour HNW release to review. His response was, “that’s a bit much!” I couldn’t agree more. While I appreciate what Anonymous is trying to do with this release and the theme he’s (or she) working with, I can’t help but think that I’d probably appreciate this a lot more if it was condensed to say 4 discs. While I enjoy the genre, even considering myself a fanatic at times, 4 discs or so seems to be my threshold for appreciating these multi-disc HNW box sets. Perhaps my opinion would be slightly different if I had several months or a year to casually digest this set at leisure, but being tasked to review this massive set over the slim span of a few weeks just makes listening to “Dresden” feel like an arduous task. I can appreciate a lot of the wall-making happening on this release, but to consume this whole set in a limited span of time, is probably best suited for the diehard Anonymous listener. I certainly see myself returning to some of these discs frequently and others not at all. While this was a noble effort and undertaking, for the me the parts were better than the sum.