Shining Sex — Miss Death
The CDR’s come in a just under A5 sized brown envelope, which features on it’s outside features two bits of stuck on monochrome artwork- on the front we have a picture of a masked women with a large spider on her arm, and on the back we have a partly nude picture of a young Linda Romay- she was one of Franco’s main muses & appeared in over a 100 movies. She was also Franco’s long time partner; sadly she passed away from cancer early this year.
The release takes it name from a character that appeared in Franco’s 1966 “The Diabolical Dr. Z”. Miss Death was an exotic dance who performed a bizarre spider & web based stage show, with male dummy sat in a chair & a skull mask. Similar odd & exotic dancer type character's would appear in a few of Franco’s 60’s & 70’s movies.
Each disc here features a part of the HNW trilogy, so disc one is entitled “Miss Death part 1”, disc two is entitled “Miss Death 2” and so on.
Disc ones track comes in at the 28.31 mark. And it’s built around a mixture of violent juddering/billowing low-end noise, which is battered & bayed by jittering mid-ranged violent grey static lashers. Ramirez lets the twin tones rage ‘n’ rip along side each other in a relatively unchanged manner, from time to time one element will maybe become more prominent or slight change it’s pattern, but for the most part this is a fairly urgent & fixed example of ‘wall-making’
Disc twos track comes in at just under the forty minute mark. This track starts in a relatively calm fashion with two or three shifts in & out of ocean-washing-on-beach-shore like static texturing dwells. Then with-in a minute or so Ramirez builds an interlock hazing type wall, which seems to be made up of two or three beach shore like static textured matts of sound. At around the six & a half minute mark he pulls back again to one static noise/ beach shore tone, and the track feels like it’s just teetering on the edge of been ANW, but it still feels a little too full to be so. From here on Ramirez builds-up, than strips back layers on noise texture these mainly stick to the original beach shore like texturing, but there’s also a distant pummelling churning stream like texture present too & the beach shore tone becomes almost a bit lashing/ ranging rain storm like in places. All told it’s an ok ‘wall’, and to start with I found the tones quite rewarding, but sadly around a quarter of the way through the track my attention started to wonder.
Lastly disc three offers up the longest track of the set at just over the forty eight minute mark. The ‘wall’ opens with mix of: rushing ‘n’ searing mid-ranged wet hissing, and a buried rumbling/ descending noise tone. The two tones are fed together to create an urgent/violent yet quite ominous aquatic seared ‘wall’. This part of the track brought to mind a slowly descending boat that’s got water pouring in through multiple holes, and though the boats window you can just make-out the figures of strange evil looking and darting mermen….nothing to do with Mr Franco movies I know, but that’s what it conjured up in my mind. As the track carries on it feels like the buried rumbling tone is becoming more & more like the rushing main tone, though this could be a trick on the ‘wall’. But this blurring/hazing of the tones is very compelling & finds the listener get more and more sucked in to the tracks doomed rushing focuses. At around the 18 minute mark Ramirez shifts the ‘wall’ to a mixture of jittering & thinner mid-ranged static that’s underfed by this tire-on-airport run-way like low-ranged billow/drone noise tonality. Once again over time the ‘wall’s elements seem to start to nicely blur into each other, before around the thirty minute we drift into thinner textural washers that seem to dart & nearly peter out. Before we return to a more consistent ANW like dwelling that mixers together locked rushing ‘n’ raining water textures…this ‘wall’ sees the track out as it slow fades. With out a doubt this a wonderful track, and is surely the highlight of this set.
So to sum-up this three disc set offers-up: one effective slice of fairly fixed, urgent & violent walled noise. One textural promising wall that seems to lose it way. And one very rewarding ‘wall’ that goes through three great & effective textural shifts.