Jute Gyte — Broken Door

Adam Kalmbach, a young music student from Missouri, has been self-releasing recordings under the arcane name of Jute Gyte for a few years now, indicating a precocious cross-genre dabbling that takes in industrial, melancholic electronica and black metal stylings. ‘Broken Door’ though is a pure digital noise workout on a 3” CDr lasting just over twenty minutes.

Kalmbach’s cover design suggests an esoteric concept by incorporating a pre-Raphaelite painting of Mary Magdalene within a border of the outlines of several crucified hands. Such Easter-ly allusions are quickly put aside, however, as the track starts, or rather blasts across the speakers as though joining it midway through, creating a corridor of boiling pitches, screaming, wrenching and skidding a violent path of restless frequencies.

But it’s not just a wall throwing down a gauntlet for the hardy listener: after percussive elements reach the surface, sounding like the speaker discharge of a nearby cellphone about to ring, the fractious fidgeting and sawing gradually thins out around the halfway mark and we’re left with a motorised flapping and heavy bass fluttering haunted by dancing wisps of glassy shards. Of course, this brief respite builds back into a wall of writhing digital blasts and sprays, before stopping suddenly with random detritus sputtering before fading to silence.

The effect is teeth-clenching, and yet the sound is very clean, avoiding the murkiness of many a noise project, and instead mixing what could be hundreds of layers of glassy, granuar synth sounds such that each one has its own place, albeit uncomfortably stressed, within the overall piece. Consequently, repeated listens always reward by revealing undiscovered undercurrents, from low-end fluctuations to science fiction trills, fighting beneath the red mist of distressed layers of brake squealing anguish.