Crash At Every Speed — Pedestrian X-ing
May’s edition of the series offers up a track from Ramirez's car crash and road wreck obsessed project Crash At Every Speed. The project has been going since 2001, and has so far put out around 18 releases- be they be splits or stand alone releases. Unlike some of Ramirez’s projects this has always been a solo project, and it really focus in on the more HNW and textured static side of Ramirez’s work.
On offer here is a single untitled track that clocks in at just under the nineteen minute mark. The track starts out with a very fierce and continuallly descend wall of roasting static, buried just to the side of this main texture we have this swirling and slightly oscillating drone. By near the forth minute the buried textured has become more weathered and rippling like the distant battering of a storm heard through a buildings walls or thick glass windows. Around the sixth minute things seem to strip or back away somewhat, and we’re left with a distant and slightly muffled static fall of texture which sounds like a rapid rain heard from under a small wall-less shelter. The rest of the track follows a similar pattern- dwelling in one textural wall wash for a three to five minutes, then adding in another texture or cut one out.With Ramirez nicely switching from tone to another tone in a subtle and never jarring manner. The whole track has a nice, bleak and often weathered feel to it- all told the tracks a rewarding enough example of slowly and subtle shifting layers of static noise, through I found it rather lacked the atmosphere and interesting textural changes that would make me want to return to this often.
So all told “Pedestrian X-ing” is an acceptable if rather unremarkable slice of subtly shifting static texturing. Certainly this is not one of my favourites of this series thus far, but as with everything put out by Ramirez there’s real clarity and artistry in the way he manipulates and controls the noise at hand.