Dead Body Collection / Svartvit — C60 Split
The tapes sleeve and the tape is worth a mention as clearly a lot of thought and effort has been put into its look and layout. The tape it’s self is hand painted black on one side, and red on the other side. The sleeve is pro-printed in black & red ink, and it features a nice grim and murky picture of a huge monolithic building or chimney against a bleak skyline. Each track also has a little poem or a few lines of prose which nicely link into the tracks titles and the vibe of each track.
So onto the tracks themselves, on side one we have Dead Body Collections track which has a fittingly ghoulish title” Wish I Could Operate On Her Again”. This tracks ‘wall’ is built around a brooding, sinister and intense bass judder that’s under fed by shadowy and bleak machine like drone loop. These twin elements nicely rub and searing against each other in a fairly unchangingly powerful and menacing manner for the tracks half an hour runtime. To me this track really seems to have capture the bleak, grotesque and sickening feel of a blood and faeces drenched operation table that’s hidden away in a run down and abounded hospital. So this is a very sinister and ghoulish tinged slice of wall making that shows DBC mixing his usual brutal and unforgiving wall-making talents with brooding and sickly atmospherics to great effect.
Onto side two and we of course have Svartvit’s track and it’s entitled “Black Bloc”. This tracks wall is built around a very battering, urgent and rapid mid-tone to bass like judder that’s weaved in and out by clipped jittering spoke like static texture. The tracks wonderfully enchanting in it’s knitted and weaving mix of tones, and to me it brings to mind some ever advancing piece of large machinery that has many smaller mechanical details and processers going on in it’s huge and noisy bulk. As the track progresses it keeps an constant and dense presence, with Svartvit skilfully and subtle altering both elements- with the judder becoming more drilling and the spoke like element become almost controlled junk metal like cluttering in it’s feel, but really there’s no great movement or shift with in the ‘walls’ unrelenting yet highly moorish attack.
So all in all this is a very nicely presented and arty looking split that features two great and very worthwhile slices of European HNW. Certainly this is one of the most wholly rewarding and consistent HNW splits I can think of in recent memory- so pick one of these up before the small pressing of 18 copies completely disappears!.