God Pussy / RRR — God Pussy / RRR
God Pussy's side opens with an intense high-pitched ringing that carries and undulates, it sounds very similar to the kind of high-pitched wailing you hear large passenger aircraft making when you are in close viscinity to them. There is a modulation taking place which feels like a low-timed delay that carries this shrill high tone through various rhythmic undulations - some time into the track and the tone begins to pulsate more and dissipate into a more mid-level static gurgling only to fall back in line with the high-pitched ringing a little further in. Having only reviewed HNW releases for the site so far, this track is decidedly not wall noise - in fact, for me it sits very much as far away from wall noise as work within the wider 'harsh noise' realm could be. In place of immersion you have a consistent and constant unsettling feeling, in place of a lack of defined and set rhythm you have a nauseatingly shifting pace that gives the listener a sense of being swept-up and carried by force across the sonic journey that the track entails - a journey that is very much 'tunneling' as much as you feel it should be 'soaring' or at least preparing to 'soar' due to the uncanny similarity of the sound to departing or landing aircraft. Throughout the near-half-hour runtime of this track I struggle to shake this imagery as being held up for example and comparison - it is an interesting conundrum to be stuck with. Considerably further in and the undulations continue to change in pace and intensity and suddenly the imagery can be shaken loose and there is more comparison to be made with an air-raid siren. Not long after this however, the track is cut short mid-wail with a deafening silence that feels quite nicely executed.
Moving into the second side and the 'Untitled' track of 'RRR' we are met with some HNW - rather traditional sounding at first, and as such very dichotomous when listened alongside the wailing 'Untitled' track from God Pussy. We emerge immediately into a churning landscape of rather lo-fidelity and crunchy HNW - it is at a comparatively low-level to the first side but the listener is led into an understanding of this choice as new 'bursts' of noise break across the wall like waves breaking across a rocky outcrop of boulders and cliffs. The bursts feel very much like they could easily overcome what we initially know to be the wall and carry it off into a new blaring and maximal high-level wall of its own. In spite of this, they never do perform this usurping that they seem to threaten, instead only serving to imbue the wall that's left to stand with a sense of calm that it probably would not have innately. This is an interesting thing for an artist to do, almost an attempt to play with the very form of HNW itself. As it might be known to some readers, I tend to commend and appreciate particularly those unorthodox wallmakers and their walls that try to artfully progress the form of HNW without giving in to totally breaking away from the form, as is often the result of wallers attempts to do so (and can usually be considered a failed attempt in regards to maintaining the instrinsic 'HNW' properties whilst also experimenting with them). Of course, the age-old (or does it just seem so because of how many times I've seen it debated?) question of exactly what is and isn't HNW and how we are able to make those distinctions, is something which I always tend to consider whilst listening to a wall, whether it seems to experiment with the form or not. Evenetually, however, the wall does seem to build to the point that perhaps it has finally become this blaring and maximal wall that threatened to usurp for so long - it has done so gradually rather than sharply though, nearly imperceptibly. There is clearly a close attention to incremental development that it is appropriate to notice and commend here.
Overall, the split is an interesting pairing of two sounds that sit fairly far away from eachother. While I wouln't personally go out of my way to listen to the shrill sounds God Pussy presents us, I feel the interesting and experimental sounds of RRR pull me in sufficiently to consider the split interesting enough to perhaps return to. This is one of the first releases of the God Pussy project I have come across, having only listened to a small handful that I can't recall prior to this. For RRR, I have been not too commitedly folllowing the project a considerable while, as I first became aware of it back in August 2015 with the 'Dead Room' release. The project has been consistent in holding my interest with solid walls that don't offer much in terms of texture but are fairly heavy and thus good for the kinds of background listening and total static immersion that I like to get into. As of writing, the tape is still available from the labels Bandcamp site and I would recommend it to someone into their HNW looking for something slightly different, or someone into harsh noise in general with a penchant towards the more minimal forms it takes. It is important to note that while I have given a low rating in this review, I do not actively dislike the release and the rating is only this low as the release doesn't meet the calibre I have set in my head for making it to the next level (3/5, which I have given out the most and now has a certain value for me as a standard to weigh releases as being either lesser, equal to or more than - which I suppose means 1/5 is reserved for releases I actively dislike).