Tromba — Juracán

"Juracán” is the first release from this weather & storm influenced Puerto Rico based HNW project who went on to put out the excellent Torrential - which made M[m] album of the month early on this year. This first release comes in the form of a double CDR set that features four twenty five  minute plus tracks of often quite active weather bound HNW, Hash Noise and thick/active textured noise.

Each of the four tracks here are untitled, with two tracks to each CDR. Opening up the set is track number one and this shifts from:  roaring & tearing battering storm swirls, to billowing & juddering  meets textural down pours, onto huge weathered & growing slow-mo jitters that are whipped by shifting wind currents, and beyond into slowing masses of juddering storm banks of ambient HNW. The track starts off quite fixed for the first 8 or 9 minutes, but from there on it quite nicely shifts and drills from one storm bound structure to the next.

Track two starts out with a hard-nosed mixture of rolling ‘n’ juddering noise & tight jittering weaved billowing. By the three minutes mark this large and rapidly expanding grinding ‘n’ juddering noise tonality is tensioning things up even more, but just when you think things are really going to explode the pace is eased down as this slowing ‘n’ spraying water like texture is added to the track. The rest of the track nicely alternates between building textural waves of sound, & more drifting/ easing off water sprayed moments.  Around the 14th minute this rotating harmonic like siren tone is added to the track, which adds another interesting layer of textural sound map to the track.

Over onto the second disc and track three starts out as a mixture of storm wind drone and slightly skipping banks of rain storm like textural static. As the track goes on the wind drone texturing gets more active and enraged, yet it remains to the back ground as the knitted rain like static down pours seem to surround it. By around the 13th minute mark the wind drone has died down to a more distant and shifting form, with the static rain battering stretching to more lengthy and layered affair.  Up until the 20th minute things remain quite HNW ambient in there feel, but after this point the building layers of sound are added to build up to an all out textural storm.

So last of all we have track four, and this track starts out with this really neat sort of hollow storm noise rage- this gives one the feeling of listening to a storm through a hole in the wall or a wind break. As the track progresses Tromba nicely keeps the hollow/ distant storm element in place, but adds in other more closer & defined storm noise tones giving one the feeling that elements of the storm are breaking off and closely surrounding ones head, or slipping inside one ears. Most of the track nicely carries-on  mixing between the more distant storm  elements with the closer storm elements creating a multi layered ambient HNW weave, but things  do go a bit more raging and battering in the last five minutes of this thirty five minute track.

So to sum up "Juracán” is a pretty damn fine opening shot from this project, and it nicely sets the project distinctive sonic identity in place. If I hadn’t heard the projects two later releases “Torrential” & “Ciclón” I might have been getting ready to give this top marks, but now comparing this to the projects later works you can hear that at times this début  lacks fully focused compositional structure and genreal dramatic sound building- start with “Torrential” & “Ciclón” and then move back to this if you dig the other two.