Static Goat — Mental Castration
This release original appeared on the projects own Dipsomaniac Records in a downloadable form, but it now gets a psychical release in the of form double CDR on the always consistent 'n' rewarding noise, HNW & ambient Minneapolis based Altar Of Waste label.
The projects sound is a truly overwhelming & head crushing mixture of searing, phaser bound, churning & twisting electro noise. Which is ribbed by grating & swooping caustic drone currents, and sometimes bayed ‘n’ brutally swayed by roasted & sci-fi seared electro beats, layers of buried vocal disturbance, and other overloaded sonic flotsam & jetsam.
"Mental Castration” is one of those releases that starts out fairly intense & brain searing, and just seems to get more & more head-fucking the further it goes on. The first disc takes in three tracks, and first-up is the just over six & a half mintues of “Castration Time” which summons up a hellish & claustrophobic mixture juddering, boring, churning, and drilling noise textures, which are swooped-on by bleak & psychedelic drones ‘n’ grim whooshes.
Next there’s the ten minute electro brain vomit of “Obese”, which brings together slowing-down-then-speeding-up seared brew of skittering & racing electro textures, whooshing & baying altered vocal swirls, and phaser like churning noise attack.
And lastly on disc one we have “Coronary”, which takes in twenty mintues of more rhythmic noise-making. This track starts out with a mid-paced mix of two highly fuzzed ‘n’ seared beat scapes mixed, which are brewed with a simple wondering bass line. These elements weave into each other, and slowly but surely more noisey flotsam & jetsam is added in, & this starts to blur 'n' distort the beat patterns. At the four minute mark the beats break down, and we move into what sounds like the sounds of several malfunctioning UFO’s crashing into each other, as we get a get raging mass of whizzing, accelerating, phazer tone, seared sci-fi droning, and this weird barely made out deep electro voice element. By around the 8th minute mark the track has become more & more dense, with rapid shifts ‘n’ mixers of sci-fi & alien based noise matter, snippets of fuzzed up dramatic B movie music, weird bayed voices, ect.
By around the 14th minute mark, the whole thing starts to become a little more structured & semi rhythmic again with huge sways of chopping & juddering psychedelic noise, mixed into with accelerating sweeps moody sci-fi tinged & caustic drone matter. By the 16th minute we’ve returned to the tracks entering fuzzed-up 'n' mixed beat-scapes, and theses start to raped ‘n’ slurred by all manner of shifting noise grains, slowed down ‘n’ melted B movie soundtrack elements, and fuzzed beat sub-tones.
Moving onto disc two and we have another three tracks, and first of these is “Lack Of Abili(F)y=T”. This track comes in at the 30:13, and it’s truly is a real head-fuck. It starts off with fairly subdued yet growing electro twanging & vibrating element-which has an very uneasy feeling beneath it. By around the minute mark, a strip yet perversely bass lined beat has moved in place, and this shifts with swirls of ghostly psychedelic vocal textures, and grown yet drowsy noise hovers- this part of the track has a great sleazed & malevolent vibe to it. By around the third minute the track starts to get more deranged & unsettling with layers of weird stretched 'n' muffled voices, odd vocal layers, shifting 'n' wonky slides of nauseating tone dwell, and the beat it self, which starts to melt & twist away from you. At the 5th minute mark we move into a swamp of wavering 'n' melted voices, speed-up music. Snippets of weird spoken word matter, various sigh & moans, and jittering ‘n’ flittering psychedelic electro texturing ebbs. The rest of the track sees the pair swift ‘n’ weave through all manner of deranged & brain frying sonic fair- moving from unsettling & hovering mixers of electro tone melt & weird voice texturing, onto slow monition ‘n’ dense noise/ electro tonal soups that are alive with shifting trails of harmonic unwell-ness & dread, through chopping yet bent electro texturing darts & drifts.
Track two on disc two comes in the form of the rather amusingly titled “I Gotta Talk To My Doctor About This Shit”. This just over nine & a half minute track brings together layers of reverberating, unwell & sinister tone dwell ‘n’ simmers, which are mix with sways of guttural & chattering alien tongued vocalising. with latter on some more slightly rhythmic noise textured elements, & sampled metal guitar slices coming in to play.
Lastly on disc two we have “Mental Fraud”, which comes in at just over the three & a half minute mark. And this track is built around an overwhelming & brain screwing mix of muffled & unwell tonally judders, and this sampled dialogue of a women talking about her different types of mental disorders she’s had, and the type of drugs she’s on- it all makes for a nicely queasy & unsettling end to the album.
So all told this is another worthy slice of creative & fairly original underground noise matter from Altar Of Waste. This will certainly appeal to those who enjoy Merzbow’s more shifting psychedelic noise, or those who just enjoy often dense & mind altering noise with a distinct deranged flair to it.