Endometrium Cuntplow / The Black Scorpio — Untitled

Hate Mail Records is a new label from California set up last year to release The Black Scorpio Underground’s experiments in noise and power electronics allied with stalwarts from the scene such as The Haters and Werewolf Jerusalem. For this 40 minute cassette, the first side is given to Endometrium Cuntplow, a solo sonic art project of David Lucien Matheke that seems to have amassed way over 100 releases in the last six or so years. Whereas this represents The Black Scorpio Underground’s eighth release, their founder, Joe Truck, is by no means a new-comer having been in various glam/punk/metal bands since the late Seventies. However, do not expect to encounter any traces of rock ‘n’ roll on this release.

The majority of Endometrium Cuntplow’s side is taken up with ‘Storms of Loneliness’ a seventeen minute, two part journey that starts as a sustained tone from what sounds like a rapidly spinning engine and predictably ends in a storm of mangling noise. In between, though, we get treated to a small array of effects that attempt to derail Matheke’s stubbornly droning machine into a kind of early sixties concrète meets Radiophonic science fiction soundtrack. This is particularly prevalent in the second half where a strong spring reverb coupled with a maximal delay unit spread wide the small, dull signals, expanding their trails exponentially until their emanations are feeding back into their source to create the cavernous carnage we’ve been expecting all along. The side is concluded by a short, inconsequential piece called ‘Shallow graves’ that uses similarly aggressive unstable engine noise to scribble an angry distorting mess.

More interesting, if less intelligible, is the flip side from The Black Scorpio Underground, whose aim seems to be turned away from all-out assault but left unfocussed, perhaps to deliberately let the combined noises find their own way. The first of three pieces, ‘Rapist diplomat’, combines Richard Ramirez-styled radio static greyness with persistent shrill feedback whining around an over-repeated sample from some public information film warning young hitchhikers that “one never knows when the homosexual is about”. Such bleak and loose strategies are continued through ‘Temporal Eclipse’ as its crumbling, backwards loop of rustles and scrapes grumbles along with an anaemic guitar refrain to form a kind of weary paranoia. The closing track confuses further with another small set of looped ‘n’ reversed noisy detritus regularly intruding under a recording of religious incantations, possibly a reciting of the Qur’aan; its title, ‘Transmorph’, doing nothing to confirm the piece’s intent.