D.S.W.A.C.V. — Belladonna of Flesh

Here’s a C40 tape from this UK based walled noise project - it appeared in late summer 2015 on Australian noise lable  Palinopsia Recordings. The tape offers up two twenty minute slabs of  entrancing, oddly comforting, yet brutal wall craft.

The release is based around the two of meanings word belladonna- of female flesh, and Atropa belladonna, or deadly nightshade. The tape features a single sided colour sleeve, and this take in two old classic paintings of women with flowers. All told a nice classy looking tape.

First up on side A we have “A wreath of belladonna leaves and berries adorns the head of the sleeping woman”. This is built layers of mostly firm, oddly slack &  lulling, yet disciplined cluttering static- tonally the textures are lower-to-mid range. Firstly we have a line of crunchy clutter, then a semi muffled rumble bound clutter, and lastly a more faint, murky & washed-out clutter. Together these elements create a most hypotonic wall that pulls you deep into its strangely soothing yet battering mass.

Flipping over to side B and we have the track “Purple veins protruding from the delicate flesh, stricken with the poison of mother nature”. This ‘wall’ follows a fairly similar cluttering tonal feel, though there seems more layers of noise here, and towards the end the whole thing gets quite crowded. To start with we get three or four similar toned cluttering descents, and these meshed together to create calming & often crisp noise bound downpour. As the track progresses more subtle cluttering layers are added to the ‘wall’, and at times these move slight out of pattern, and this pull you further into the ‘wall’ brutal suck.  By the end of the track the textures seem much more packed-in, with less room- yet the whole thing still remains quite calming, like watching a rapid rainstorm from the shelter of the leaf canopy of a tree.

So in summing the tape offers up two very appealing ‘walls’, that focus in on similar clutter based texture, yet each manage to be worthy in their own right, and work well together as a pair.  The release came in an edition of 15 copies- so I’m not sure if you can still get hold of a physical copy- but if not it’s still up at Palinopsia Recordings in digital form here.