Now here’s a welcome blast from the past, which recently dropped into M[m] letterbox- “Lovely. Beautiful. Imperfect” is a CD featuring two lengthy slices of walled noise from Ataraxy, a German HNW/ noise project that put out a fair few releases in the early 2010’s.

This 2013 release comes in the form of a pro pressed CD, which is kind of unusually for the wall scene, as often when it’s in the CD format we get a CDR. This comes in a CD-sized slim DVD case- which features a black, white and green colour scheme- on its front cover a picture of a smiling woman with her eyes blacked striped out punk style. The release appeared on Audio Arts Recordings- with the release coming in a scene generous edition of 100 copies.

Each of the tracks here run for dead on 33.09 minutes, and first out of the bag we “Purity”. This opens with a fading-in blend of chopping ‘n’ burred low end and billowing wind texturing. As the minute's tick by we get layers of rapid juddering-yet-thinner static rush, and swirling/ bigger sweeps of static bound added and shifted into the wall, and under the lower end seemingly shifts from been longer to shorter chop ‘n’ roll. So what we have here is a decidedly active and urgent example of the wall form. Sure the textures are neither hugely creative or varied, but as a competent example of the shifting wall form, this is rewarding.

Next, we have “Katharsis” here we start out with a deep and blunt purr grind bound low-end, this is topped with jittering static bound mid, with a neat semi rattling sub-tones blended in.  This track is much more set/fixed in its feel, and I must say I enjoy the blend of grind bass and constantly jittering static on display here. It’s kinda nice/ refreshing to hear an example of old school HNW with this track,  as these days we often get more layered/ detailed takes on the form- and I do miss the old days of simply bone grind and brain jittering static bound walling.

In finishing, it was great to hear/ check out this Ataraxy that I’d missed out on back in the day- with both tracks been worthy here. And it’s certainly made me keen to revisit some other work of this largely consistent, but lesser-known German wall-noise project from back in the day. As this only turned up around a month or so back for review, I’m guessing it’s still in print with copies available for purchase….so I’d say it’s well worth tracking down if you fancy a trip back to the early 2010’s wall scene