Condo Horror — Social Cleansing

Here’s another tape from the Endless Landscapes of Decay label, this time featuring Condo Horror (though, as before, I am reviewing a digital version). The tape has three tracks: a long 15 minute piece, a short five minute track, and a nine minute remix of the second track (again, as with the previous ELD tape, this is constructed by Endless Landscapes of Decay). The tape cover has a beautiful black and white image of ruined buildings, reflecting in a pond. However, the buildings look as if they’ve been destroyed by bombing, and indeed, the pond might well be a bomb crater filled with water…

The first track, We Have Better Plans For Where You Live, is the longest piece on the tape - and a nice little oddity. It’s built on a foundation of thick, crumbly wall textures, stereo split through the speakers; though they are low in frequency, and also in volume. Initially, I thought that Condo Horror had perhaps added a recording of rain into the mix, but after a while I decided they were definitely the sounds of power tools. Whilst this might sound like an odd element to introduce (or even, from the opposite direction, a stereotypical one, given the long tradition of power tools in industrial and noise) it works bizarrely well. Often it sounds like intermittent layers of trebly crackles, weaving in and out of the wall beneath - at points, things become blurred to me, and I don’t know if I’m hearing recordings of tools, or the distorted crackle of a white noise generator. The track’s foundation becomes more agitated near the end, before the piece suddenly cuts to fading noise, as if the plug had been pulled.

Social Cleansing, the next, and shortest, track, also has non-traditional wall elements lurking. Here, they take the form of swooping and phasing synth-like sounds, and perhaps mangled vocals. They move around, hidden behind a wall of obliterated, blown out noise, which stutters with saturation. Social Cleansing (Forced Migration), the remix of the previous track, doesn’t drag the source material too far from its starting point. The synth-like elements still hide in the background, whilst the saturated noise is reduced to a pleasing, hovering, distant churn. It’s almost as if the track has simply been slowed down, or time-stretched.

Like a lot of the wall releases I have been reviewing recently, Social Cleansing has little time for HNW purity. All three pieces on the cassette use non-wall elements proudly and distinctly. The title track is perhaps a bit light, a little fleeting; whilst the Endless Landscapes of Decay remix adds a haunting quality, and near melodicism - with the synth sounds attaining a theremin-esque ethereality. We Have Better Plans For Where You Live is probably the most interesting piece, with the power tool recordings (I should point out that I’m referring to large tools - as might be used in roadworks - rather than, for example, household drills, here) working on both a sonic and a conceptual level. It constructs an impressive skree, that is as ferocious to the ear, as it is challenging. Like the project’s recent Bright Facades of Prosperity release, this is another tape of innovative work.