Unsustainable Social Condition — Disparate Strata of Humanity

The most extreme form within the experimental music scene is undoubtedly noise, in all its forms. An atonal, cacophonic and violent phenomenon that has little to do with music in general, this style has won a huge number of fans around the world and continues to attract new followers.

Matt Purse is an American noise artist who started out creating work in 2014 with a band called Remainderless. Going onto set up Fenian and Unsustainable Social Condition, while doing various creative activities in parallel and founding the label Oxen. Unsustainable Social Condition his most prolific project and, since 2015, the discography of the project includes seven full-length albums and ten different releases, most of which are mini-albums and split albums. In early 2021, the American label Breaching Static released a new full-length album from the project Disparate Strata of Humanity. It’s an album released as both a CDR, and digitally.

The album cover is a black-and-white photograph of a fragment of an old illuminated sign showing many light bulbs and a damaged capital letter J. No textual information is included on the cover. Unfortunately, the meaning of this photographic work is not clear to me. However, this cover has an unmistakably old-school industrial / noise vibe, which sets the listener in a certain mood before listening to the album.

The album consists of four rather lengthy tracks, with a run-time of just under fifty minutes- and it features very intense and energetic harsh noise. From the first moments of the album, a wall of noise, made in excellent stereo, falls hard on the listener. The main character of the album is almost static noise walls, the intensity, textures and frequency components of which change during one track. Somewhere behind these walls, chaotic noises develop, supporting the main noise line. This background was created using a large number of effects, but the source of the sound was not clear to me. Maybe Matt used synthesizers or samples, or even vocals. Using chaotic noise as a backdrop for fairly intense textured noise walls is a very interesting idea. However, it seems to me that this background should be given a little more attention, and at points put forward into the sound picture. 

Some of the more effective moments appear in the second track Undercutting, where we find rather rewarding moments of lengthy drone elements. However, the most successful, in my opinion, is the final track called Final Trench. It differs greatly from the previous tracks by the almost complete absence of a wide stereo panorama and a near-static wall of noise. In fact, it is pure harsh noise. As for the overall sound, it seemed to me that the album is practically devoid of pronounced low bass. However, the sound does not hurt the ear and is perceived quite easily, which I consider an undoubted advantage. 

After playing the album a few times, I came to the conclusion that this is a great work, reminiscent, first of all, of course, of Merzbow. Though with a slight imbalance between chaos and static. So it's not a masterpiece, but it's a solid and powerful harsh noise. Such noise as it should be.