Antihuman — Annular Cancer
It’s a shame information is completely lacking in the packaging of this CD. With noise projects like these I always like to get some idea of the equipment that is being used so I can begin to work out how the tracks are done and how much the equipment has had to be pushed and prodded to get the sounds out of it that appear on the pieces.
The album contains 11 tracks all with titles that relate to medical conditions. So you get some lovely track names such as Bleeding Fissure, Ulcerative Colitis Friction etc etc.
The tracks all sound like analogue based pieces of noise with a large helping of guitar feedback thrown in for good measure. It’s all fairly fast with no real let up in pace and pretty low on bottom end. There’s a lot of high pitched shrill sounds and plenty of middle. If you were to take early period Merzbow and mix that with some of the higher register sounds of early Whitehouse then you wouldn’t be that far off what you get from Antihuman.
It’s a good noise album, suffers perhaps from repeating itself a little too much. Some more variety in speed and pitch would benefit immensely, as apart tracks 8 and 9 (where you get a lot more deeper noises) it could all be part of one track or performance. If you take an artists as prolific as Merzbow you would imagine that everything would sound the same but he actually puts a lot more variety into his pieces then most people would imagine a noise artists is capable of doing. I think that’s where a lot of people working in the noise genre go wrong they think noise can be just purely noise but you still have to have light and shade fast and slow otherwise it all becomes too samey. Antihuman suffer a little from this way of thinking on this album and it’s perhaps a little bit too 1990s but overall it’s actually a well-executed work and well worth listening too.