Black Air — Paris
The project is listed as a four piece collaboration on discogs, but this release just features Sam McKinlay(The Rita, BT.HN, Vice Wears Black Hose) and Gordon Ashworth(Oscillating Innards, Riverbed Mausoleum, Protein Den). The Vinyl Lp offers up two single & lengthy investigations in layered and shifting noise matter. The albums theme is the underground sex trade and prostitution taking place with the streets of Paris- going from the 18th century brothel paintings by Impressionist artists Edgar Degas, through to the later 'Paris' underground b/w hardcore magazines of the late 60s/early 70s. Both tracks shredding, shifting and broken textures are meant to sonically emulate the worn holes and battered states of the female street workers stockings.
As with anything put out by the excellent & mainly vinyl based Italian label Urashima the black label on black vinyl LP comes in the labels trademark silkscreen sliver ink on black cardboard sleeve, which features a card insert. Both the front sleeve and insert are adorned with grainy and grim pictures of women of the night in various stages of undress and this nicely adds to the whole sleazed feel of the sonics with-in.
Side ones untitled track comes in at the 20.43 mark and is the slightly longer of the two side long tracks here. The tracks a very shifting & layer altering mixture of: skipping ‘n’ jumping lines of textured static, grim ‘n’ murky sonic rips ‘n’ tears, rolling and grey industrial tinged noise grains ‘n’ rumbles. One cant really detail the whole tracks layout as it’s shifting and altering most of the time with the pair creating this great and brutally shifting sonic topography of textured noise. The track remains mostly multi layered in it’s feel, though from time to time the structure does thin out, but there’s never a full break in the textural attack. It’s a great track that really does offer up new textural detail each time you play it.
Side twos untitled track comes in at the 17.49 mark, and this track is far more building and less shifting in it’s feel compared with the first track. It all starts out fairly sparse and brooding with this distant rumbling tone, but slow & surely the pair add on first one than another layer of: jittering static, looped textural ripping, revolving grainy judder ect- they leave a small gap of a minute or two for each new additional layer to sink-in, but by the tracks mid-way point the pair have built a full and detailed wall of noise. Yet even though the layers make up a very dense, shredding and sleazy suffocating whole you can still, if you listen close enough, make out the detail of each texture in the layered mat of sound. Again this sides tracks another very rewarding piece of noise making, and I partially like the way the pair carefully add and build the walls textured weight- it’s almost like your been slowly but surely bricked into the track.
So to sum up “Paris” offers up two sides of skilful, atmospheric and rewarding textured noise making, with both McKinlay & Ashworth showing they have complete control of their often complex and detailed noise textures .