Cut Hands — Black Mamba
William Bennett’s Cut Hands is predominantly a percussive project, utilising “djembes, doundouns, ksing-ksing, rin, manjira” as well as “acoustic drums”. It supplements these sounds with synth drones, and even electronic “noise” on “No Spare No Soul”. Its unclear how exactly the percussion is deployed - there’s an uniformity in sound that suggests the instruments have been sampled; and indeed the actual patterns of percussion suggest the precision of a machine’s involvement. The inlay, however, features an apparently exhaustive list of instruments used - and a sampler isn’t among them. So, that’s somewhat of a question mark: either some kind of sampler or computer has been involved, or Bennett has tremendous technical ability with percussion. Its an irrelevant issue anyway, since whatever the method, the end results are really very mundane.
Essentially the pieces on “Black Mamba” can be divided up into drone tracks, percussive workouts and a few pieces which compromise the two. So, in this middle ground, we have (for example) “54 Needles” and Krokodilo”, which combine eerie drones and washes of sound with fairly linear rhythmic underpinnings. These tracks are probably the most listenable on the album, but at best they’re a nod back to “tribal techno”, or merely “adequate” dark ambient or “ritual” music. The drone tracks -“Nzambi Ia Ngonde”, “El Palo Mayombe” and “Nzambi Ia Muini”, for example - are again mediocre; there’s nothing spectacular to be found in them. If anything, given their near-identical lengths of about two and a half minutes each, they merely act as interludes and breathing spaces in the album. The percussive pieces are the tracks which stand out on “Black Mamba”, as well as being the appeared thrust of Cut Hands. They’re interesting, but again nothing that will reside in my stereo for long. At worst, they sound like awful, if complex, drum machine explorations; or very bad percussive techno. The title track is the most concentrated example on the album, but it struggles to enthral the ear; building up layers of insistent poly-rhythms which just lead nowhere - I feel like I’m waiting for something to happen. “Erzulie D’En Tort” fares better, with quite hypnotic sections flitting from speaker to speaker, but it still feels very thin indeed. The chattering woodblocks of “Brown-Brown” actually remind me of some old electronic library music; the kind that foresees techno, years before its emergence. The final track, “Nine-Night”, is somewhat more “rounded” than the preceding pieces; it sounds convincing and solid, with washes of synth and an animated groove. But, again, its arguably nothing more than proficient dark techno.
This is a frustrating release in many ways. The bare sounds of the percussive instruments used are really very powerful and beautiful: truly thunderous booms, ear-bothering metallic pitches and wonderfully noisy “cymbal” washes - you can’t help but feel these things could be better utilised. It is interesting to hear these instruments used as Cut Hands do: we’re more used to hearing them played collectively by ensembles, with the accompanying rhythmic “errors” of human performers; but here, they are played with an alien, machine-like precision. Its a clever conceit, certainly, but not something that my ears clamour for. To be honest, I’m not convinced anyone would give “Black Mamba” much notice, if it wasn’t for Mr Bennett’s previous activities; but saying that, there are definite seeds here for something great to grow.