Clive Henry — III
I guess you could say this release is one of Mr Henry’s less progressive & experimental releases. As two of the tracks here are very much about brutal & unrelenting walled noise, though as with anything put out by Mr Henry there is a lot of thought put into the textural lay-out & detail of all the tracks.
Opening the CDR we have the track “I Started Something I Couldn't Finish”- which comes in at the 16.32 mark. The tracks is built around a firm & tightly bound mixture of textures- we have: a rolling yet slightly uneven low-end rumble ‘n’ roast, a selection of three of four smaller jittering ‘n’ juddering tones, and a semi shifting worming crackle. To start with the track seems rather a like any common garden slice of dense & un-relenting ‘wall-making’, but the more you focus in & concentrate on it the more you can hear of the rewarding & creative textural detail that have been weaved into the ‘wall’- at times Mr Henry subtle shifts the layers of textures, but at others he just let the texture play-out their detailed yet punishing fixed weave.
Track number two is the baby of the bunch at 5.45 mark, and it’s entitled“ And Still I Remain The Servant Of My Flesh”. This track starts off being built around layered & sinister breather textures, then we get a single burp, before move into a mix of unsettling human moans- which could ether be from sleeping or sexual pleasures. Next we move into a sonic conveyer belt of quick textural chops, wheezing breath, before we move into these odd-washing-your-month-out & choking sounds.
The last track “So I Finished Something I Couldn't Start” comes in at 20.47 mark, and it finds Mr Henry offering up another dense & punishing slice of walled noise. The track is very full & overwhelming in it’s churning ‘n’ droning feel, yet it’s a more active along it’s dense axis compared to the first track. It shifts through various taut ‘n’ galloping plates of roasting, billowing & bone juddering noise. Each texture sort of complete engulfs you in it’s roasting churning or bone juddering drone, then subtle the next texture slips in- so it feels like you are being dragged over first one textural terrain, then another. Though the textures shift the whole track retains a thick & unbreakable brutality, & at times it almost becomes like fierce sort of ANW as the tones start to boil together into a thick searing mass.
I’d say “III” is a good place to start with Mr Henrys’ work if your into more standard walled noise, as this release is less experimental than some of his other releases. Yet it still highlights his ability for creativity with in a more traditional walled noise setting.(As of writing this review Bored Bear Recordings still has copies of this, and it can be purchase direct from here)