Last Rape - The Dark Is Death's Friend [Pig Records - 2011]“The Dark Is Death's Friend” is a c36 tape that offers up two sides long tracks of weathered, lo-fi and brutally walled noise from this mainly giallo themed HNW project. Last Rape is one of the more known of Richard Ramirez’s giallo influenced projects, and the current line-up takes in Ramirez & Sean E. Matzus. The tape comes in a plastic baggie that features two pieces of white paper- on one you have the track listing & the projects name in black & white, and on the other you have full colour reproduction of the poster artwork for 1975 Luigi Cozzi directed giallo movie “L'assassino è costretto ad uccidere ancora” ( US title “The Killer Must Kill again”). The film featured George Hilton & Antoine Saint-John, and the plot revolves around a greedy adulterer who makes a deal with a serial killer to dispose of his wealthy wife, Nora. Unfortunately, a thrill-seeking young couple steal the killer's car with Nora's corpse in the trunk, ending up at a run-down seaside villa. Side One is taken up by the title track, and the ‘wall’ on offer here is an harsh example of muilt-layered, weathered & lo-fi HNW. The tracks ‘wall’ is a gruelling mixture of rushing textural roar, distant rumble ‘n’ almost harmonic hum, mid-paced hissing chugs, slow burning feed-back hum ‘n’ buff, tunnel like billowing, & static aquatic rushers and melds.The track sort of builds up & adds on textural detail on as it goes along creating quite a nice seared narrative sonic flow to the track. I think this is my favourite of the two track here as there’s quite a neat & grimly haunting undertone present here for much of the tracks runtime, and I like the way the track tells a seared & subtle shifting sonic tale. Side two track is entitled “Forbidden Photos”, and this is another example of weathered & muilt layered walled noise. The ‘walls’ built around an extremely industrial tipped juddering ‘n’ churning tonality, an crisp & static wrapped jitter, a billowing road sweep like drone, a cluttering static like churn and possible a few other tones….it’s difficult to define & quantify them all as there’s some many layers of sonic detail here. It certainly remains ‘wall’ like through-out, though there is a fair bit of movement with in the tracks layers. All told it’s an effective ‘n’ nasty slice of layered & brutal walled noise. So this c36 tape offers up two sides of very nasty, weathered, and ear roasting lo-fied slices of industrial roasted walled noise. Both sides are effective & well put together examples of muilt-layered HNW- but be warned both sides are deeply nasty examples of the HNW at it’s most extreme. Roger Batty
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