Ashley Blues/Logi​cal Fiend — Split

This tape, from Autistic Campaign, is very smartly decorated indeed. A full colour, three-panel inlay, featuring a collage-work, is wrapped around a black and white card containing all of the release’s information. Three tracks from Ashley Blues and one from Logical Fiend, with the latter dedicated to Mikhaïl Kalatozov - a russian film director. This all amounts to about thirty minutes of sound, from two contrasting approaches.

Ashley Blues is up first and begins with “Paperday”, which sounds like buildings collapsing in slow motion. Grounded on - what sounds like - a looped guitar shard, the piece is dominated by twitchy noise slivers and undulating, queasy synth lines. This then cuts straight into “Paprika”, an abrasive drone constructed from saturated noise and swirling sounds which might originate from a violin - its either that or a processed synth. Buried in the low-fidelity noise is a genuine tension, with violin-like harmonics dancing amid the percussive rumbling to good effect. The tape cuts, for a third and final time, to the last section: “Poison”. Starting with a stuttering guitar loop, the track soon adds another loop: a vocal processed through a vocoder. This unusual combination is surrounded by swooping noise and noises, most of which are colourfully processed. The whole affair has the definite potential to sound like “multi-fx hell”, but somehow - possibly because it is so garish and yet lo-fi - it comes across as genuinely “odd”.

This clash of colour is not carried across to the other side of the tape. Logical Fiend’s track, “Ëåòÿò Æóðàâëè”, is most definitely back and white - and that’s not a criticism at all. It begins with audio from a film (we can assume a work of Kalatozov’s), with voices and singing; before dirty, lo-fi noise enters. Framed by a low drone and some fizzy treble, the texture is dominated by a mid-frequency scuff; all of which would be a little underwhelming were it to comprise the entire piece. However, as an introductory section to the full-on wall that follows, this scuffing section adds some nice contrasting tones to “Ëåòÿò Æóðàâëè”. The wall itself enters after a few scrapes and some feedback. Its somewhat mediocre (in the most positive sense), quite crunchy, quite crumbly - but nothing exemplary.  Its one real redeeming feature, is the wild treble rattle buried within its textures. The wall eventually recedes to reveal more film audio; this time starting with piano, but ending with sirens, bombs and explosions…

This is an interesting split, from two projects with interesting ideas; but overall, its somewhat frustrated by the quality of the sound. The low-fidelity saturation of the Ashley Blues side, does add an effective “obscuring” element to proceedings - but it also means that many of the sounds and textures are reduced to weak “washes”. For Logical Fiend, there is a general lack of detail in the displayed textures. With both of these concerns, I don’t know if the cause is tape duplication, recording method or deliberate production on the part of the artists; but whichever way, this lack of detail and clarity is unfortunate to my ears. Nevertheless, two projects to keep an eye on.