Broken Cursór/Torturewave — Split

Here’s a two-way wall noise split severing up two densely battering 'n' terminally nasty examples of the genre. Each artist offers up a half-an-hour wall, and each is as punishing & unforgiving as the other. Featured here are two Indonesian projects  Broken Cursór, and Torturewave- I was aware of/ reviewed past Broken Cursór releases, but this is my first taster of Torturewave work.

The release appears on Portland, Oregon’s Basement Corner Emissions. It’s a digital download album, with the starkly monochrome artwork taking in the names of the projects at its top & bottom, and murky/ muddled texturing/ shapes art in the middle. The release can be found just here. 

So first up we have the Broken Cursór track “Peeling Off Your Rotten Skin”. Here we find a very muddy, thick, and densely muffled blend of galloping bass shred, roughly rattling rips, and buffeting judders. One's mind keeps trying to follow the path of each layer, but really it’s near impossible to fully keep a mental hold on any of them- as they are all stacked in such a thick & sloppy manner, bringing to mind a huge congealed and grey fat-come- gristle mound, where you really can’t fully identify the meat/ muscle for the discharged/ pus ribbed fat.

Next, we have the Torturewave “Slowly Scarped With The Scalpels Dull”. The track opens with an atmospheric hart pulsing tone and a single sinister breath-out. Before we drop into the ‘wall’- this track is not as muffling in its feel, though it’s still damn unforgiving. It brings together a rapid blend of rumble ‘n’ steam chugging sub-bass, with cutting ‘n’ rattling mid-ranged judder. The juddering layer has this neat sort of doubling quality, which at points makes it difficult to fully hang on to its pattern. If the first track was a tick crushing, this feels more akin to the sonic equivalent of a hunk of meat, muscle and bone been drag behind a vehicle- as it bucks, jumps, and tears. With the track playing out with a gurgling groan/ sigh.

If you're after nasty and unrelenting ‘wall craft’ that simplistic yet brutal encasing in its make up- this split will most certainly appeal. And I’ll definitely be checking out more Torturewave too, and it's great to see that clearly, Indonesia is getting its own wall scene now.