Stolen Light — Square Wheel
Square Wheel is a release that sits somewhere between densely hazed harsh noise, and quirky to surreal sound scaping, which is often buried in the mass of the tracks. It’s a five-track album, that’s presented in the form of a pro-pressed CDR on Illinois-based Oxidation Records.
The five tracks featured here have runtimes between nearing seven and fifteen minutes, though they most hit around the ten-plus minute mark. The Stolen Light project is mostly all the work of USA’s Brett Lunceford- though a few tracks here do feature the contributions of Soren Lunceford, which I’m guessing is Brett’s wife/ relation. The project has been active since the late 1990s- putting out around thirty or so releases, and as far as I can recall this is my first taster of the project's work.
The album opens with “Always Choose Booth”- this begins with a child asking which mic he’s got to speak into, then we suddenly get dropped in the densely hazed mesh of sound. The extremely thickly layered track consists of a constantly rattling static noise grain element, forking ‘n’ dragging elements, possible very muffled and mangled spoken word, weird bays and possible children's screams. It’s certainly a very overloading opener, and over multiple headphone plays you start to make out more sound detail and tone
As we move on, we come to “Culling The Excess” here we find a thickly rattling ‘n’ juggling track built around a dense mesh of knocking ‘n’ smashing glass tones, chugging tone detail, and other buried sound layer detail- which again over time comes to be revealed. The album plays out with the at first slightly more brooding ‘n’ creepy “Superdude” which opens with a blend of shadow drone billows and eerier hisses. As it continues feasting electro grind lines, odd buzzing almost vocalising elements, and buffeting on ‘n’ off purrs are added to the mix.
For the most part Square Wheel was a rewarding journey into hazed ‘n’ dense noise-making. A few of the early tracks do utilizers fairly similar sound elements/ tonal ranges, so maybe it would have been nice if the track running order had been mixed up a bit- but each of the five tracks has their worth and do reward repeated plays.