Sleep Of Ages — Failure Made Flesh

Santos Productions presents yet another full-length CD-R by the ubiquitous Sleep of Ages. Released in 2012, Failure Made Flesh is an early entry in the SOA cannon. Based out of São Paulo, Brazil, Elias Cheika Jr. has been releasing “low budget exploitation harsh noise” since 2011. Cheika also toils in HNW under the Carrion Black Pit moniker and industrial/power electronics as EXU. Any avid reader of this publication will have seen his name and projects bandied about quite liberally. I actually spun this a while back, but since I had reviewed his Bleeder album recently as well as a 4-way split that CBP appeared on, I thought I’d meditate on this one for a bit before putting in my 2 cents.

Failure Made Flesh offers 7 tracks of harsh noise mirth and mayhem replete with: high end screeching and squealing, low-end rumbly crunch, buzzsaw industrial tones and even some flourishes of glitch and drone. There’s also a contrast between shorter noise experiments and longer form tracks. The album begins with “Sour Rain,” a brief piece of dense atmospherics, something that sounds like a stretched out horn and a some buzzsaw shredding metal cacophony. It ends nicely with some ominous church bells to round things out. “Suffering Comes by Design” and “Savage Blood Bath” follows. I mention them in the same breath because both tracks sound quite similar in delivery. They both deliver a mass of broken static shifts, lots of high end frequency squealing and bending, with some glitchier and spacier tones working their way into the mix. If my ears can be trusted, lots of phase shifting and flanger action is going on in these tracks. The latter track offers an extended sample of some pissed off dude, but I couldn’t quite make out what he was saying other than an enunciated “fuck”!

“After You, My Dear” offers a short piece of reverberating metal echo, continuously ringing in repetitive waves. “Contact is Gone” is the most wallish piece on the disc. You’ll find blocks of low-end juddering, but broken up by more dynamic shifts of contrasting highs. My favorite piece on the disc is “Tell Me That Story Again Dad.” It’s short track of whistling pipes, but made all cold and synthetic sounding. It kind of chill, yet kind of eerie. It sounds like something they’d play in on a horror soundtrack to build tension. The final track, “Way Down South,” offers lots of suppressed buzz, glitchy computerized sounds, high-end tones, blustering static, exhaust noise, any many other tricks found in any competent noise-maker’s kitchen sink.

This isn’t anywhere near my favorite album by this artist, yet there’s a certain preciousness in this recording. It has the feel of an unfinished product, an album released out discovery, testing out and getting a feel for his gear, far from the heights of his creative potential. It definitely sounds like an early recording. Some tracks feel like they haven’t quite been fleshed out, some sound like the makings of a great piece that ends short, where others might have been helped by trimming down and more selective editing. Yet, it’s those crude edges, give it a….well….real crude charm.