Compoundead — Cutting Your Certainty
First up we have the title, and this comes in at just shy of the 15 minute mark. It opens with a slow drifting entry of sustained & sinister feed back pitchers that are underfed by eerier & chilling drone matter. As the track progresses it drifts along in a ghost-in-the-machine like vibe, as you make out distant whispers of voice texture with the slowly swirling & ebbing lines of subtle noise tentacles whip. By around the 6th minute mark the track get quite whipping & lashing with it’s mid to high range noise textures. Also more scratching & dragging mid-range elements have appeared too, yet the moody & chilling drone backdrops still remain the focus of the track as these now taken on a almost hovering 1960’s sinister psychedelic feel. By around the 11th minute the pace & busyness of the track seems to easy back, as bleak organ like drones move with looped fairly aggravated scratching texture & sour alien like pitch weaves.
Next is “Absence” which comes in at just shy of the nine minute mark. This track opens with a grey & uncomfortable haze of hovering drone textures-these are soon added to by grim scratching, forking & churning sub-tones. It very much feels like your drifting into this vast grey & ancient machine that’s been melancholy churning away for 1000’s of years. Sadly they keep added more & more tones to the sound soup, and very quickly the great grey & chilling machine type throb & churn is lost. Around the 6th minute they try & peter back the sound picture once again, and move towards a looped grey drone buzz & throb, but I’m afraid my interest was lost when they overcrowded the sound picture early on.
Lastly we have the fittingly entitled “Aftermath”, this track comes in at just over the five minute mark. It stars with chugging & bending sinister feed back like loop, and this is soon joined by several layers of looped buzzing & scratching noise layering. To start with it sounds to me like a sped up, and not very good copy of Wolf Eyes at their more noisy & yet still creepy. But instead of locking down on the atmosphere they created, they yet again add on more layers of drone, and rather dull crusty noise tone break downs. Before stripping everything back & drifting out into a rather bland feed back haze.
Sadly all but the first track here follow a similar route, they build up an effective atmosphere & nicely sinister grey vibe, then they start adding in more & more sub-tones and textures in a often haphazard & mood killing form. In my mind only the first track here truly works, as they manage to hold back on the pointless & mood killing tonal fiddling. I certainly enjoy & appreciate the vibe they try, but mostly fail to create here- on the whole this is sadly a missed opportunity, I’d certainty give this project another chance if they focused more on atmosphere & less on fiddling.