Grunt — Someone Is Watching
"Someone Is Watching" is a very welcome reissue of a late nineties limited tape released by French label Force Majeure. The material included was re-mastered for CD back in 2005, but the actual release came out only in 2011: the proverbial noise procrastination strikes again.
Anyway, what we have here is classic, noisy, aggressive Grunt power electronics. Heavily delayed and over-effected vocals, layers of distorted harsh noise-style contact microphone abuse, nasty feedback, effects and synth packed in a handful of pretty cohesive and strong tracks.
The only slower-paced, spoken word sample-rich, disquieting moment ("You Can't Hide") serves well as an "eye of the cyclone" of sorts. I especially appreciated its low-pitched, creepy and reverberated growls. Just like in many power electronics releases the vocals are almost completely unintelligible, but the delivery is excellent and they sound more like an additional, recurrent layer of sound in the big mass of crackling, hissing and screeching. Overall the sound of "Someone Is Watching" is surprisingly "clean" for stuff probably recorded on tape back in 1997. Every piece is easily discernible and all elements work together without overlapping and becoming a complete mess.
The thematics of this release (surveillance cameras, Big Brother control, etc) don't interest me much but it doesn't matter, since the sounds are so good. In conclusion, this is nothing that stretches far away from the canons of the genre, but for those into power electronics and harsh noise it's like the daily apple that keeps the doctor away. It's good stuff.
This reissue is a good chance to get obscur-ish fifteen-years old material from one of the most interesting masters of the craft, so I strongly recommend this CD to anybody that doesn't have the original tape already.