Rough Sex Quartet — Rape Victim / Bar / Slit Throat / Gas Station / St
I guess the first thing that comes to mind with this set is total & overwhelming sonic attack- each 45 minute side of tape features just a single track, and each is as crude, pained & perverse as the next. This is not a noise-set to put on to drift-off, relax, or trance-out to…this is a noise set to test ones limits of endurance, offer pained focus, and to fill ones head with all manner of perverse & violent images. I’ve enjoyed the intensity & focused sonic perversion of RSQ work in the past, but this release really takes everything to a whole new level, and just like any extreme form of art has it’s plus & negatives.
The three tapes come in a VHS box- this features a light brown college art cover taking in porn & death images. And in the side the box you get a selection of paper inserts- these take in more retro-porn artwork, colleges, track listings ect. Really if you picked up the Midnight Heat boxset on Narcolepsia from last year- you’ll get an idea of what to expect here.
Opening up the release on side A we have “Pink Heel”- this track opens up with an amassed sonic pillow of blunt, extremely crude & similarly low-to-mid ranged noise- which is set to a muffled & churning gallop. The whole thing literal forces you down with its airless, thick & ugly weight. Fairly soon you get weaves of higher pitched squealing noise added into the tortured tapestry, and as time passes you get more lose & sloppy textural churns added into the depraved sonic mass too. As more time passes you get subtle shifts in each layers, so the whole thing becomes become more & more caustically blended & sourly deformed in it’s brutal pummelling & squealing mass. There’s nothing clever, arty or crafted about this- what we have here is dense harsh noise/ drone noise at its most extreme, punishing & unforgiving. I kid you not it takes some endurance to get though this first side on the first playing, and really this is one of easier/ varied tracks of the set.
Flipping over the side B and we have "Heart Of Gold, Tits Of Steel". This brings together a extreme crude & simple blend of a few layers of noise, which are feed out into a sour, searing, and unflinching flow. We have: A extremely muffled spinning rumble, A hazed blur of circular static, and a constantly buzzing ‘n’ piecing on/off rotating tone. These elements are fed out in rapid & totally undefined manner- with nearly no movement, rewarding sonic detail, or any kind of sonic tricky for ones mind to hook onto. As I said this set just get more & more unforgiving as it progresses.
So moving onto the second tape in the set, and side C we have "Sadists Of The Midnight Hour". The track opens in a slightly more moody state, as you get a blend of distant rumbling & on/off forking noise. But fairly soon things firm & dense-up for another unforgiving noise ride. We get offered up a blend of: distant churning ‘n’ droning & focused yet muffled grinding. The droning elements sounds like either a distant recording of a road hum, or distant construction site recording. As the track progresses both elements seem to start to shift and subtly change- the droning seems to opens up slightly, while the grinding moves between reducing back, focusing on more of a higher pitched whine, or becoming more judder bound. Though none of these adjustments really amount to much, with that same cloying & suffocating feel remaining, which is present though-out all of this box set. I guess you’d say this is sonically one of the more active tracks here, but as I say it’s activity doesn’t really move anywhere, other than deepening the sweaty & muffled feeling of weighty despair.
On side D we have the charmingly titled "A Scalpel Blade And Some KY Jelly". This track sees the collective focusing in on the more dense, battering & totally unforgiving wall-noise side of their sound. The ‘wall’ kicks straight-in, and blends together a selection of very tightly weaved & similarly toned lower- to-mid ranged textures. We have: a deep billowing, buffeting rumbles, & rapidly descending judders- plus the odd hint at more tumbling crustiness. The ‘wall’ is very blunt & ill-defined in it’s attack, so you are often trying to hear what textures are doing what. Oddly I found this one of the least effective sides here, as the textures used just felt a little bland & unremarkable. Sure it’s hellishly dense & intense, but ultimately my mind wondered; which is never a good thing.
Moving onto the final tape in the set, and on side E we have "Nylon Intruders". To start with the track opens with a very urgent blend of: a looped fan-belt purr, a fixed buzzing electricity hum, a distant tumbling, and a sustained tone- which sounds a little like the sound an electric chair would make. As the minutes tick by the distant tumbling shifts into this churning rumble, as the other elements seem to get more & more unrelenting in their attack on your nervous system. This track really nicely captures the feeling of sustained panic, and holds it there for most of its running time- as ones mind moves from first one tone, to the next trying to find tonal relief or nice pattern to latch onto, and course there aren’t any. I’d say this stands as one of my highlights of this set, as the blend of textures are cruelly appearing, and there is some quite nice subtle detail shift along the tracks length- making the whole thing slight more sonically palatable. Though this is still extremely intense, with the title perfectly fitting the intensity of the whole thing, as it summons up images of violent & prolonged home invasions.
So last up on side F we have "Home Invasion". And here the project return to a more straight HNW sound. The ‘wall’ is built around layers of rapidly juddering noise, which are set in a fairly simply boiling pattern. Tonally the layers move from deep & bothersome, to skittering & skidding, onto to thin & hissing- with later on a few high pitched layers appearing . Through-out the tracks length you get a shift in focus between the three or four layers that make up the ‘wall’. It’s ok, I guess, though nothing special. It certainly ends the set on a simply & brutal manner.
I certainly respect how ugly, head-drilling, & totally uncompromising this entire set is- and if your looking for the next extreme in both dense harsh noise & pained HNW, I think it’s safe to say with Synopsis:… RSQ have exceeded. Though I can’t really say I’d often want to return to this, purely down to the rather one dimensional/ similar feel of many of the tracks here, and of course the overwhelming intensity of it all. I guess you could see Synopsis:…, as the sonic equivalent of films like the original Guinea Pig series, or the August Underground films. This is noise stripped of its meaning, art, and humanity, and what you are left with is just painful, unpleasant, and truly hope-less/ sanity battering sound. Approach this set with both great caution & a sane mind, as RQS have pushed noise to a new extreme.