Boar — Dead Existence
To start with this project was purely HNW, but over the last few years Nowacki has mixed in elements of harsh noise, drone, power electronics, and noisy experimentation into his releases. Many of "Dead Existence" tracks have a groundings with in the HNW sound, but Nowacki often expands & adds to their walled-noise template.
The release offers up nine tracks in all, and these each last between just over the minute & a half to just shy of the twelve minute mark- but most of the tracks fall around the five to seven minute mark. On the whole the album offers up quite a variation in type of track, we go from the grating & rapid HNW of “The Dried Socket”, which mixers together churning ‘n’ roasting set/dense crusty static with for forking mid to upper ranged texturing. Though to the brooding electro noise tone dwells of “Angel Skin Decaying”, which mixes together malevolent ‘n’ purring synth drone sustain, with piercing high pitch tone holds. Onto harsh noise/ HNW crossbreed of “The Fragrance that brought you back” which starts out as thick roasting & steadily galloping walled noise, before getting ripped ‘n’ pummelled by searing noise stretchers & churning violent textural slices/ grinds. Onto the last track “Walking Love Corpse” which see the sound move from a mixture of tumbling yet locked walled noise & piercing drone sustain, onto juddering ‘n’ crusty walled noise earthy brutality that concentrates on thick billowing/jittering textural sustains, before ending up the circling grim grey glowing drone repetition.
My only criticism of the album as a whole is that there are no real long dwells in pure & lengthy HNW composition here, but then again I feel if there had been this might have unbalanced the albums flow somewhat. And I get the feeling this release is being used as a spring-board to get people into Boar’s sound, so longer lasting slices of HNW may have put some listeners off.
Clearly Nowacki has taken a lot of time work on and building these tracks, to make this release both brutal yet still relatively approachable to none hardcore HNW heads. On the whole I can highly recommending picking this up if you have any interest in creative Harsh Noise with a HNW or seared yet atmospheric drone leanings.