Smrznik — Welcome To The Standard Nightmare
The tapes cover features a picture of a half man/half robot figure, with it’s hands locked together and fixed staring metal face set with humans eyes- this nicely compliments and really visual describes the bone chilling electronic textures inside that feel often like human kinds dieing spirit with-in the machine.
All the sounds here are created by Smrzink self made electronic texture ‘n’ noise box that he has christened the ‘Throatblain’. The tape offers up two side long tracks called “ Welcome to the Standard Nightmare once” and “ Welcome to The Standard nightmare once again”- each side finds Smrzink unfolding a series of locked cold jitters or glitches which he knits into a barren and stark wall of obsessive yet moorish wall matter. Neither side really alters or deviates from its originally starting point or it's static textural pattern, through at times it feels like it could be either speeding up or intensifying but I think that’s just down to ones imagination. The only really variation here is the odd off pattern glitch or sound fleck that’s caused by the old tape recorder that was used to master the tape. Both tracks use an almost identical set of sounds; with the second side varying the first sides patterns and textures very slightly, yet Smrzink really makes both tracks very chillingly entrancing & hypnotic in their cold circuitry jitter, purr and stuck glitch patterns. Meaning when either side comes to an end you egger to flip over again & re- entomb yourself in the sonics cold steel womb.
Smrzink certainly has one of the most distinctively chilling sounds in the HNW scene, and this C60 tape wonderful places you inside his cold machine like sonic world. It's ideally music for either reading nihilistic and paranoid sc-fi novels or long walks over barren and unchanging ice/ snow bound landscapes.