Fukte/Soma — Cycle
The first thing you noticed about this two way noise/ drone split is it's very distinctive and arts/grafts hand made packaging that the two 3inch cdr’s come in. Firstly the glittery spray-painted CDrs( one blue & the other green) are held on a round magnetic & metallic ex computer disk drive. And this is placed in-side a cd sized felt wallet that stapled on two sides and has a flap out the top. The wallet also has a glittery two colour blue and green circle in it's front middle that matchers the blue and green of the CDR’s. It’s a well thought out and original bit of packing…but what’s the sound like inside I hear you ask?
On the first blue spray painted disc we have Fukte’s track which is entitled “Condensation”, and this runs for twenty minutes and forty five seconds. The track starts out with quite a juddering bound selection of dense & meaty noise tones, these have jittering & higher pitched edges mixed in with them. The judder elements have quite a active ‘wallish’ like dwell to them, but there’s too much movement & shift present here to be truly called HNW. As the track moves towards it’s five minute mark the judders slow down and the jitter is more pressing and distinctive. Also added to the mix are muffled and indecipherable field recordings that sound like they could be a mixture of some sort of: public area announcement talking, children screaming and possible traffic noise- but it’s difficult to figure out what exactly it is a it’s buried and muffled out in the mix. The rest of the tracks lenght finds Fukte shifting between the slowed down judders, faster judders, texture roars and billows, and jittering fan belt noise grates and dwells- with the woozy and blurred field recordings shifting underneath. All told it’s a rewarding mixture of active noise texturing & creative yet mangled field recording textures.
On the second disc we of course have the Soma track which is entitled “Evaporation”, and this track also comes at twenty minutes and forty five seconds. This discs track is a lot more fixed meditative and noise tinged drone based than the first discs piece. The track here conists of a slow, flapping 'n' simple rhythmic loop that buried deep under a mass of repetitive, harmonic yet noise seared guitar textures or electronics. The track has quite a noised-out and trace induced psychedelic tribal feel to it, and one very much gets sucked deeper and deeper into it with each repetition of the simple rhythmic and drone noise texture. It’s as rewarding as the first disc/track- but very different too, yet some how the two tracks work well together as a pair.
So all in all a rewarding split that sees the first disc offering up an active mixture of textural noise & blurred/ blown-out field recordings. And the second disc a trance inducing slice of noise drone and simple tribal beat. And it has a rather neat/ distinctive packaging to finish it off.