Griz+zlor — Glaciating 2
The Griz+zlor project has been around since 2006, and ever so often since then it’s put out a darkly punishing slice of thick walled noise. Behind the project is Philadelphia based Paul Dever whose also in the following projects: Failure Of A Great Machine, Cursed Aether & earthspace noise. The grey (oddly physically weighty) tape comes in a pro-printed black & white sleeve that fittingly features a picture of a grim arctic glacier. This tape was seemingly released as a double c95 tape set with “Glaciating 1” in spring of 2011 in an edition of 4 copies- this new single tape edition appeared a few months later.
Each side of tape here features a single untitled track which was created by feeding field recordings of a swiftly moving stream into various peddles and electronic equipment, and while both tracks still hint at their coldly rushing field recording starts there’s little in the end tracks that actually sounds like recordings of rushing water. Each side of tapes ‘wall’ is extremely thick, crushing, often crusty & completely over-whelming in its sonic weight.
Side ones track finds a dense textured ‘wall’ of sound which bleakly bounds together mid-paced mixture of: hacking judders, billowing almost harmonic drone weaves and a tone of buckling, crackling & crusty noise map terrain over the top of it all. The track brings to mind trying to walk in a force ten arctic storm as dusk is just starting to seep-in; everything around you seems whitely battering, cold and unrelenting with a deep tinged of grey-ness running through it. The track batters, chills & rages away at you for it’s full forty five minute length, from time to time the texturally map may suddenly slightly change or alter, and a few points it stops very briefly, but for the most part this is damn unforgiving & unmoving.
Side two starts out very lo-fi & a little wonky with this galloping, blown-out & slightly stuck propeller texture, which is over buffered by a thin layer of rumble & wind billowing ‘n’ batterings. As the track progress the stuck propeller texture seems to get more weather & less defined, and the uneven textured elements become more pronounced & battering. Through-out the rest of tracks length there’s a sort of subtle battle going between the propeller textured & the weathered moments- at one point one more prominent, then the next the others more prominent. I find this whole sonic battle highly appealing, & I think that makes this one the most enjoyable of all the side length tracks on either of these two Glaciating volumes.
So this tape offer up another two very unrelenting, battering, and often weathered slices of lengthy HNW. For my money this tops the first volume, but both are equally unflinching & unforgiving. This is only for your harden & long term HNW fan only.