Hana Haruna — Sonic Pornography for the Now Generation
Going from the CDR’s artwork the theme seems to voyeurism, and male-on-male dogging- as on the front cover we get a group of three men staring into a forest. Then inside various shots of male limbs, clearly looking like they're involved in some kind of sexual encounter. The CDR is presented in a jewel- with pro-printed black, purple & white artwork.
The first track here is “Someya Yuka”- this slides in at spot on the thirty-minute mark, and it’s a very thick fairly shapeless wall. It brings together a rapid & skuzzy swirling, slight snapping & grainy gallop, and a muffled rush- underneath this we can just make out some kind of dialogue & possible scoring, but really it’s so faint you can’t really define anything. The way the wall is mastered & layered nothing is nuanced or in any way defined- the whole thing just comes over as speeding almost white-out wash of sound. I’m guessing the use of buried dialogue etc is meant to cause mystery, unsettlement & pull one in deeper into the whole thing- but sadly I found it the reverse, been annoying & frustrating. As the ‘wall’ moves along its half-an-hour runtime there is certainly shift & sway with-in the whole thing, but again this didn’t really appeal to me- as the shifts are just an undefined as the rest of it. So, as you’ve probably guessed by now I didn’t enjoy this track- really finding it chore to play through.
"Niwa Mikiho" is next, and it’s the baby of the bunch of walls- with a runtime of fifteen minutes. Here we get a decidedly lo-res & stripped back wall that built around a bucking ‘n’ juddering bass tone, and a line of stabbing-to-violent feasting static. There’s a nice & nasty primal feel to this ‘wall’, and the whole thing nicely captures your attention in it’s constantly jerking ‘n’ crudely pumping structure, which fits the releases themes perfectly- I could easily have listened to this ‘wall’ for another fifteen minutes- the whole thing has a nicely sleazed & nasty blunt feel to it.
"Toeda Rina" comes in at the thirty-minute mark- here we see a return to the denser sound of the first track, but there is a bit more definition & layer separation here. We get a mixture of muffled roll ‘n’ rumble, this is topped by a mass of cluttering & snapping static- and at times this gets searing, as the noise moves towards mid tones. Once again there seems hints at some kind of muffled dialogue, and at moments these rises up in the mass in a nicely jarring manner. Like the first track, there is shift & movement present, and this is handled better than the first track, though at times it does sound a little random. On the whole, as dense active wall noise goes this is ok, though to be honest, I’m not the biggest fan of active wall-making.
I’d say if you liking the move active & dense side of wall noise you could get something from Sonic Pornography for the Now Generation- but sadly for me, much of it is shapeless( or near shapeless)- with only the shorter middle track really grabbing me at all.