La Mancha Del Pecado — A Triple Fetishistic Treatment: Tribute to Raoul V

Here’s a triple disc set from Altar Of Waste, delivered in its house style, with - as ever - the smartest of packaging. This artwork collects up images of women, presumably from the porn movies of Andrew Blake: the Raoul Valve of the title, is the primary soundtrack composer for Blake’s films; and these cdrs are a tribute to his works. Miguel Perezin - the man behind La Mancha del Pecado - has taken Valve’s pieces (described in the liner notes as mixing ‘lounge, world music, jazz and ambient’) and subjected them to ‘effects and amps’; resulting in the three discs here. Each disc is dedicated to a specific Blake film: ‘Exhibitionists’, ‘High Heels’ and ‘Girlfriends’, respectively.

I think I presumed, for various reasons, that my ears would be met with varieties of HNW, when I pressed play; however, I was quite wrong. There is a HNW shadow lurking over and under the three long tracks, but they never fully obliterate into walls - or rather, there’s nothing ‘traditional’ here, in an HNW sense. Instead, we are presented with odd, windswept ‘noise’ pieces. There are speech-marks around ‘noise’, because none of the discs truly convince - as far as being ‘noisy’; truth be told, a lot of the time, La Mancha Del Pecado presents a halfway house between noise and dark ambience. This is, perhaps, a little unfair - the start of ‘Slaves With Stockings And Heels (Kelly Havel)’, features a high-pitched, noisy jitter; and there are other noisy sections throughout the set - but, from a ‘birds eye view’, the general atmosphere feels closer to ‘drone’ than ‘noise’, as such. The overall sound, which is repeated across the three discs, is dark, billowing and droning; with the general saturation of all elements creating that billowing/windswept feel. As usual, this saturation has the effect of ‘blunting’ any detail; so there is a sense of murkiness to proceedings, as well as a ‘smoothing out’ of the tracks - both in a sonic sense and in terms of content. There are more detailed elements and sections - small rhythmic passages and murky, reverbed, synth-like patterns, in particular - but a cruel pen might write that the three cdrs are interchangeable, to some extent. The final disc/track is centred around a collaging of beats and dark choral drones, but, regardless, the washed-out sound remains and thus the sense of homogeny. Its almost as if there’s a metaphorical blanket over the three pieces, smothering them into sameness.

This is a somewhat frustrating set, since I feel that the overall sound/production detracts from the content’s possibilities. Everything is blown-out and saturated, without creating anything overwhelming - or interesting in a textural sense; rather, it smothers, with a genuine danger that the individual tracks become indistinguishable. Arguably the most satisfying part of the set, is the final few minutes of the last cdr, where everything is pared back a little; the sounds ‘breathe’ much better, and detail finally emerges.