Nar — Recycled
The Recycled series is one of the most well known and long running sub labels/series on RRRecords(which was set-up/ run by Lowell, Massachusetts based Ron Lessard, who is seen as one of the godfathers of the USA noise scene ). This series has been running since 1991. Each release in the series is taped on old cassettes of pop and rock music, so in some case the originally audio elements are still audible (but un-surprisingly not in this case). The tapes themselves are labelled with a simple strip of adhesive tape(red in this case) along the spine of the insert with the artist's name hand-written upon it and "Recycled" as title. The series has seen releases from all over the world wide noise scene taking in the likes of: Aube, Merzbow, The Haters, Wolf Eyes, Vomir, The Rita, Richard Ramirez, Incapacitants, Runzelstirn & Gurgelstøck, The Cherry Point, John Wiese, Prurient,Smell & Quim and beyond.
Both tracks here are untitled, side A’s track is very much set, thick & fixed in its attack. While side B’s track is still dense & thick in it’s main structure, but there are some nice & rewarding shifts with-in the ‘walls’ two main textures.
Side A’s track brings together a very deep ‘n’ drilling low-end tonal judder, and a mid-to-high pitched jittering. The low-end tone is very bass bound, muffled, and continual pummelling in it focus, while the jittering tone has quite a nice fixed searing/grating/ grinding wheel like feel to it. These two elements are fed together in a most intense & enclosing manner, yet like all of Nar’s work there’s some very moorish & entrancing about the 'wall'- really given the whole thing the feeling of some ultra bleak, encasing, nihilistic yet intense narcotic turned into sound form.
Side B’s track opens up with a muddy mid-to-low ranged churning ‘n’ juddering- this is backed by this continually descending muffled rumble. To start with it brings to mind something repetitively churning/ shifting in a mass of sludgy mud ‘n’ stale water. But fairly soon the muddy churning ‘n’ juddering tone starts to become more rapid & agitated in it’s feel…like some form of creature that’s stuck a trenched encloser, and it’s rapidly buffeting against the sides. At around the 5th minute the rumble turns more into a repetitive buzzing ‘n’ throbbing distant motor like feel- and this now starts to become seemingly the dominate tone. In the meantime the other stuck battering tone seems to slow & easy back….as if the trapped creature is slowly but surely running out of energy. By around the 10th minute we have a mixture of a highly agitated juddering/ hammering tonality, which is underfed by this murky & winding down low-end rumble. At around the 17th minute mark a few more extra layers of juddering ‘n’ hammering are added in, but these still retain the similar tonal range to the first set…so this creates this great feel of slurred/ blurred ‘wall-making’, which seems to be literal engulf you it’s sludgy yet muffled ‘n’ muddy weight…also the whole thing seems to slowing creating a even more intense feeling, like your trying to make your way through muddy & rancid sonic quick sand…trying to define the textures & their patterns.
All told this tape offers up two very satisfying ‘walls’- side A is set, bleak & intense. While B’s is just as intense, but instead of fixed battering, you get a subtle shifting ‘n’ warping bit of ‘wall-making’.