Various HNW Artists — Death Metal
The four plain white cdrs are each marked with a felt-tipped number, and come inside a dvd sized box, which features on the outside a grim yet arty black & white picture of the front side of the peddle, it’s distinctive DOD lettering and the peddles rows of knobs. Inside the box you get: a slip of card featuring on one side the track listing and on the other side the circuitry lay-out for the DOD peddle, a reproduction of the peddles operation leaflet, and lastly a small badge with the a picture of one of the DOD peddles dials wth the letters HNW below it. So all in all a nice thought out bit of package.
Onto the first disc and we have an hour long track from two piece Swedish grim and battering project concrete Threat. The tracks fittingly entitled ‘Total Death’, and it starts out with a pre-teen child talking for a few seconds about the warning on the box about the parental advisory explicit noise warniing, and the kid says “that means you may want to notify your parents before using this peddle”. Then it dives head-first into a extremely thick and brutal 'wall' that’s a mixture of: a mid-paced almost caustic groove bound juddering texture, and a constant extremely billowing and air tunnel like raging drone. The track nicely brutalizes and hypnotizers you over it’s hour length in a fairly unmoving and total overwhelming manner which almost makes you want to turn your hi-fi speakers up to max and bury your head in them. So it’s a great unflinching and hypnotically brutal start to the set.
Disc two offers up two untitled just shy of thirty minute tracks from Texas wall noise/ harsh noise act W.G.M/ White Gimp mask. The first track is the shortest of the two at 26.52 mark, and it finds W.G.M building a fairly active and moving ‘wall’ from lo-fi revving, static juddering repetition, and smaller/ thinner hacking static tonality. The tracks an ok example of lo-fi, crude and active wall texturing, but for me it rather lacks anything special, and it never really stays in one place long enough to become truly trance educing. Track number two comes in at 29.11 mark and it starts off with a fairly stripped/stark yet brutal electro baying/ bleating type tone repletion. By the second minute mark an electro fired juddering and jittering noise grain has weaved it self with the bay/bleating tone, to create a great lo-fi and stark mat of wall noise matter. For me this second track is the more successful of the two tracks on this disc- as it has a really appealing, atmospheric, but lo-fi caustic feel to it.
Disc three finds a just over hour long track from Serbian based Dead Body collection, and the tracks entitled ‘walled With metal ‘till death’. The track finds DBC violently churning out a very nasty bass bound juddering 'n' hissing static jittering wall of thick and battering wall making. The ‘wall’ has a very urgent, angered and tortured feel to it with DBC battering you slowly but surely into submission. The track doesn’t really depart too far from what we’ve heard from DBC in the past, but on the whole it’s brutally rewarding. I’d say this isn’t one of DBC greatest moments, but it does keep your attention through-out, so I guess you’d call it a rather 'by numbers' but effective contribution to this collection.
Lastly on disc four we have three twenty mintue tracks French HNW act Å. First up we have the track ‘Rest’ which is built around a urgent, taut and addictive mixture of mid-tone electro juddering and higher pitched fan belt slip grating repetition. Next we have a track entitled ‘In’ which is built around a mixture of meaty buzzing electro dwell and mid-paced meaty juddering; again this tracks very addictive yet very nasty. Lastly we have ‘Peace’ which brings back the meaty mid-paced judder from the first track with taut and tight weaves of skipping and crisp static texturing. This disc is a great end to the set, and it's one of my favourite of the four discs on offer here.
‘Death Metal’ is a fitting sonic tribute to the brutal sonic tool that is the DOD Death Metal distortion, sure a few tracks here are not as good as others- but for the most part this is very rewarding. Heres hopping that AFP see fit to put together a second collection of tracks based around this great and extreme sonic tool.