Gordiacea — IAMWORNSDEYUH

Here’s a cassette on Altar of Waste, released in a very limited edition of 10 copies. The inlay is dominated by a murky shot of a snowy forest (I think…), which is very evocative, and reflective of the sounds within. The tape has three tracks - two long, one considerably shorter - and amounts to just over an hour’s material.

The first piece is called 150127 (all the tracks have similar, numerical titles, which may refer to dates; it’s unclear), and is 21:22 minutes long. It begins as it ends, and in between is no different: a blown out, tonal drone, walking a delicate genre border between drone and static noise. The centre of this wintry blizzard is built from low, singing tones, which flicker and hum against each other, but never stray any distance. Around the edges of these, delicate crackle and fizz dance. The effect is simultaneously crushing and oddly empty, conjuring up a shimmering atmosphere of hovering dread.

160921 emerges with rhythmic bursts of noise, before settling down (as such) to a tempestuous wall of skree. Throughout the piece, less abstracted (obliterated, rather) sounds can be heard in the maelstrom: delay pedal-esque swirls, and chainsaw tones. On first listen, I was convinced that a heavily processed guitar lay behind all this; after several more listens, I suspected that IAMWORNSDEYUH in its entirety is guitar based. The track squalls away for just short of nine minutes, with a constantly shifting top layer of dirt, founded on a more lumbering low-end. The last work, 150128, is a return to the stasis and lurking menace of the opening track. Again, a cluster of tones dominate the sound field, whilst chilly, breathy noise textures lurk in the periphery. The atmosphere here is perhaps more overtly hostile than in 150127, with a deeper sense of foreboding and danger. As the piece progresses, without any real change, the mood becomes more helpless, and hopeless. At points, it feels like there are subtle EQ shifts, but these might just be the effect of a change in my head position. In the last five minutes, a dramatic development: a looping guitar melody rises up, accompanied by buried, blurred vocalisations. It’s a neatly cryptic ending to the album.

This is a very solid release, not the kind of thing I’m normally drawn to, but regardless a very solid release. The longer, droning tracks, 150127 and 150128, are the more effective pieces here, but they do benefit from the contrasting 160921 placed between. Although I said that the first track (and the last, for that matter) straddles the adjoining territories of drone and HNW, this is perhaps better pigeon-holed as Blackgaze - or rather, given that I’ve never knowingly heard any Blackgaze, this is what I hope Blackgaze sounds like (forgive me). Barren, bleak noise-drones, bathed in melancholy, and cold despair; simultaneously visceral and hollow.