Dead Body Collection/ Clive Henry — I Will Never Forget Her / VI
As with most releases put out by Mr Henry this release is a rather arty looking & well presented bit of packaging. The pro-pressed CDR comes in a A5 plastic sleeve which along with CDR features five white pieces of art card that take in texts, & two photographs- one relating to each projects track.
Up first we have Dead Body Collection’s track which is entitled “I Will Never Forget Her”, and comes in at just shy of the thirty minute mark. The track slides in with a thick ‘wall’ that’s made up of a mixture of billow, droning & juddering noise textures- one or two of the textures are moving at a slightly different pace/ pattern to the others which gives the illusion of the ‘wall’ been both fixed yet faltering with-in it’s layers- this effect of course works nicely with-in the love lost/ emotional context of this release. For most of it’s running time the ‘wall’ stays in this full/ fixed-yet-different-layer-speed-mode, yet it feels like the ‘wall’ is slowly but surely getting more faltering as it progresses. Around it’s 18th minute another layer of different textured noise is added to the ‘wall’, and this nicely intensifies the breaking down/ off-kilter yet still full feeling of the track. I must say this track is a most effective bit of HNW with DBC keeping his trademark brutality yet trying to do something a little different with in the wall context. The art card part of the release that relates to this track takes in a picture of a graveyard stone angel overlaid with a picture of a mutilated female corpse, and texts' take in what seems like at first a love/ erotic bit of prose that turns decidedly macabre & gory in it’s last few lines.
The Clive Henry track is entitled “VI”, and comes in at just under the 32 minute mark, and like most of Mr Henry’s work it goes through several shifts/changes along it’s length. The track opens in quite stripped textural form with a thin line of noise that mixes together a fairly agitated cable like crackle with smaller static soldering sparks, by around the 5th minute mark the crackle has become more focused & controlled with the more sparking moments dissipating- I found that this part started to get quite entrancing unlike the start of the track which left me rather cold. At the seven minute mark a sample of a women playing with a baby is added in, and the ‘wall’ dies down- the sample sounds like personal recording of Mr Henry with possible his daughter Or young niece- as the women names Clive at one point in the sample. The sample last around four or so minutes with child chatter & various adults talking. At just under the twelve minute mark the noise slams back in a much thicker & denser form, the ‘walls’ built around deep boring bass bound noise that is over fed by a line of jittering /juddering mid-range noise crackle- this second layer of noise has this great sort of weaving back a forth quality to it, as the bass noise texture seems to get more & more intense. As the track goes on further the jittering 'n' juddering elements seem to become more & more manic/ dense, as if great sweeps of static rain are falling around you in a slow motion brooding & intense sound storm. There’s no doubt that there’s some reallly powerful emotional at play in this track, and most of it is very rewarding & on par with Mr Henry’s past work, I just felt the start of the track rather let the side down a bit.
Artcard wise for this track we get a picture of a little babies hand with a male adult hand archway like on top of it. Text wise we get a few lines from reprinted song lyrics that seem to be about the wonder of children & how much they mean to us. Then there's a longer section of prose talking about been single & not having a child, & trying to describe a male/ female relationships ….like most of Mr Henrys texts, that come with his release, it’s thought provoking & well put together.
On whole this is well put together & thought-out split with both parties tracks working well together, and as I said early on the only really glitch is the start of the Mr Henry's track, but that’s just my take on it...you may well enjoy it!.