Gomeisa — The Sixth Hour

“The Sixth Hour” finds Canadian based Harsh Noise Wall project Gomeisa offering up C60 worth of decaying, stop starting, to thick and head crushing 'walls' that are themed around Franz Kafka's short story, "In the Penal Colony," which ‘describes the last use of an elaborate torture and execution device that carved the sentence of the condemned prisoner on his skin in a script before letting him die, all in the course of twelve hours.' A Fine and grisly subject for a HNW release

The tapes inlay is nicely arty and slick looking printed in black, white and red ink, and in side it features an excerpt from Kafka’s story, where the device is describes in gruesome detail. Side A’s untitled  ‘wall’ starts out with a slow, slogging and crusty wall of crunching and bone grind texture- which keeps shorting in and out like a misfiring junk crusher trying to grind rocks. By the three minute mark things have started to firm and thicken up, through the pace is still sluggish and slowly ripping. This deep bass rumbled and subterranean growling wall of tone takes centre stage and you feel like your in a slow monition rock fall with Gomeisa nicely split the wall into two distinctive tones; a juddering, tumbling slo-mo roar and a more jagged and hissing Piercing . The rest of the thirty minute track finds Gomeisa nicely moving together the two strands of the ‘wall’ in a very slow crushing, intense, yet highly atmospheric manner; with juddering boil and feed-back drone smarts like tendencies appearing here and there after the half way mark.

Flipping over to side B and this sides untitled ‘wall’ is a lot more straight forward, fixed and repetitive in it’s texture and feel compared with side ones fairy active take on ‘Wall making’. The ‘wall’ here  is built around a very thick, muffled and mid-pace juddering/interlocking static tones- you have a constant looped & rolling greyed static element, and then a juddering to grey brain drilling boar like tone. Gomeisa nicely yet sadistically  feeds these two elements together to form a nicely enveloping, brutal and airless ‘wall’ that really entrances you in a wonderful manner. There are the odd deviations and stops along it’s 30 minute run, but mostly it stays fixed and unforgiving. I really enjoy both Gomeisa more active and more fixed takes on ‘wall’ making, but for me my favourite of this tape is this second side as it just feels like a wonderful yet painful endless fall down a very long and  mostly unchanging yet oddly very hypnotic tunnel.

Yet another great release from Gomeisa who really seems to be putting his own original and distinctive stamp on the HNW genre, yet keeping to the genres origins and extreme spirit.