Tissa Mawartyassari & PBK — And the Angels Wept Upon Descent

And The Angles Wept Upon Descent is a collaboration between female-fronted wall noise project Tissa Mawartyassari and psychedelic ambient noise project PBK. It appeared in mid-May of this year on Pittsburgh based Enforced Existence, coming as either a C60 tape or digital download.

The yellow shelled cassette features black texts- with the tape appearing within a clear tape case, which features a j-card sleeve that on its front cover features an illustration of a yellow gowned figure standing on a small cloud with its arms held out.  As of writing this review the label still has copies of the tape left, and you purchase it, or the digital download of the release(which apparently includes two bonus remixes of the two tracks) just here .

The release features two-track( one on either side of tape)- there’s “And The Angles Wept Upon Descent”, and “What Lies Below The Red Water”. So the first track hits just shy of the eighteen-minute mark- and here we find a blend of mid-range hacking-to-lashing noise and off pattern sputtering rips.  This is underfed by a slowly revolving bass drone that’s at the faint base of the tracks ebb and flow, and it creates a most rewarding feeling of drifting ominous foreboding. As we move on both textured noise elements and very subtle atmospheric elements altered, with the noise shifting to dense more cluttering dwells, and crusty hacks. And the atmospheric elements hint at distant string unease.

Moving onto the second track and this is the longer of the two tracks at just over the twenty-three-minute mark- here we get reverse in the sound make-up, with very much more the ambient side coming to the fore. We get a slow rising blend of lightly harmonical tones and distant atmospheric billowing- the harmonic elements bring together a ringing element and a slowly gliding string tone, that moves between low and fairly high whistling. As the track moves on a more buffeting bass drone rises from time to time, and this is of course blended with the atmospheric billowing bound noise texturing. The whole thing track has a wonderful feeling of muffled and lightly battered forlorn-ness, and the textured noise elements are dealt with in a wonderful controlled and nuanced manner.

And The Angles Wept Upon Descent is a rather interesting and original blending ‘n’ blurring between textured noise and foreboding ambience- and it really is most effective in the way it's primal focuses switches from noise and ambient on each track. Let us hope these two work together again in the future, as this is a great collaboration- which really deserves more mining.