Visitation/ Vomir — Split
The white-shelled tape features project labels on each side of it, and comes in monochrome & fairly stark collage sleeve- taking in grainy female porn, torture pictures, and text elements. This release appeared in an edition of 35 copes, but sadly as with most things Vomir related these disappeared fairly fast- but you can still download the release on the labels band camp.
So on the first side of the tape, we have Visitation- this Adelaide’ based project is al the work of Shaun Mara, also of walled noise projects Morte Cammina, Girl On The Bridge, and Willow Park- he also runs the Australian HNW label Needle And Knife. Visitation has been active since around 2016- putting out around twenty plus releases. And though the project has been steadily releasing work since it started, this must be the first new work I’ve heard from the project in a year or so. The track is untitled, and it finds Mara bringing together a blend of slurred, tunnelling & rumbling lows-to-mids, with looser, smaller & shifting static play. The ‘wall’ felt akin to making your way through a marshy & fog hazed bog while fighting your way your way through layers of slowly scuttling layers of cobweb. There’s most definitely a moodily muffled & slowly hazing quality to this wall, which is most effective & really pulls you deeper & deeper into the ‘wall’. At times it feels like the speed of both textural maps are altering- but I’m not sure this is really happening, or just the effect of the way one's brain is getting confused by the different textures. Though there is a certainly loose-ness & shift present in this track, it thankfully never feels shapeless or random- with Mara maintaining a keen sense of focus & mood through-out.
Moving onto the second side, and the Vomir track- I’d hope if you got this far in the review, and not dropped out at the opening paragraph- you’ll know who/ what Vomir is….but if for some reason you don’t, then this Paris based project is one of the most known, unrelenting & prolific projects in the HNW scene- starting around 2005, this project has produced hundreds of release- with pretty much 99% of the releases focusing in on set, unmoving, and crude wall matter. The track on offer here is Untitled, and is built around a firm base of slight buzzing & subtly glinting drone simmer- which is topped a mixture of hissing & chopping mids, and blurring rush. Together these elements create a truly punishing & head grinding attack that’s both compressing & roasting airless. The subtle buzzing & glinting feel of the under-drone is something I ’ve not heard Vomir do in the past, so it’s nice to see his deviation from his more expected texture traits- yet still keeping things very, very intense.
All in all this split is most worthy- with both sides nicely presenting the listener with fierce & seared ‘wall’ craft, that’s both fairly original & more than a little moorish. I’ll certainly be keeping a closer eye on Visitation, and Mara’s other projects from now on…and with Vomir you know they’ll be another release coming sooner or later.