Torturing Girl — Self titled
The Black on black vinyl comes in the distinct silver ink on black card house design of the Urashima label, and the cover features a topless 60’s sexploitation star standing against a wall. Featured inside the sleeve is an 8 page photo comic in Italian which features and male/ female couple having sex then the man seems to kill the women, and then (bizarrely) seems to proceed & press a brass roller or long camera lens up and down the females naked/ dead body!. It looks like it’s made up from the pictures from some sleazy and violent 60’s or early 70’s sexploitation movie stills, and I guess it works as a sleazed visual companion to the jabbering & often manic noise sonics with-in the black vinyl’s grooves.
The first side finds a mixture of baying & jabbering screams, forking mid-to-high noise pitches, and billowing mid winter storm like noise drones that are all forced together into a dense & ugly noise storm. As the track goes on it all seems to become a bit more muffled, dense & blunt in it’s feel with whistling noise pitches mixed with coarse judders to create a very dense noisy improv air. Along the tracks seventeen and half minute runtime there are some quite effective moments when the whistling pitches are slowed down and stretched across the sound mass, but sadly on the whole I found the track too manic, chaotic and random for it’s own good.
Side twos track blends together blunt juddering junk noise lined lower tones with caustic forking higher noise tones- all for a much more rewarding side of noise making. Once again the track has a dense & chaotic noise improv feel to it, but somehow this side seems more rewarding & a little more controlled with the sonic yin/yang of forking high pitch noise tones & mid to lower toned junk noise judders and scrambles. In the last four or so minutes of this twenty minute track Touring Girl slowly strip & ebb the track out so it becomes a very rewarding billowing and weathered thinned textured rumble.
As collaborations often go this is somewhat of a mixed bag- I think to my ears there’s too much of Torturing Nurse’s jabbering & manic noise improv in the mix, and too little of Alo Girls more controlled, creative and atmospheric noise craft on display here.