Vomir/Clive Henry — Unitled
The pro-pressed CDR comes in a A5 plastic sleeve which along with CDR features five white pieces of art card that feature texts & two coloured pictures that relate to each parties ‘walls’. It’s a really nice, simply yet arty & very well done bit of packaging that rather brings a sleek art gallery like presentation to the normal grim & lo-fi packaging of much of the HNW genres output.
Moving onto the tracks & up first we have an Untitled twenty three minutes & twenty three seconds track from Vomir. This track offers up a continual descending, crushing, dense & extremely thick ‘wall’ of mid paced juddering ‘n’ roaring noise. For me the ‘wall’ feels like your stuck on a continual descending automated staircase, that just keeps going deeper & deeper down into crushing crustiness. It’s a fine slice of what Vomir does best, and it’s damn hypnotic too.
Up next & lastly is the Clive Henry track “II”, which comes in at just shy of the 35 minute mark. Mr Henry maybe a relative newcomer to the HNW scene, but he’s been working in the wider experimental scene for a few years now, most notable he’s one of the main & constant collaborators with Matthew Sweets excellent doomed psychedelic folk project Boduf songs. This ‘wall’ starts out with a urgent yet addictive mixture of controlled billowing ‘n’ roaring noise drone that’s battered & caressed by this focused & set jittering ‘n’ crisp static tonality. As the track moves towards it’s six & a half minute mark a more ripping & juddering semi-off texture pattern appears from the ‘wall’, this really starts to screw with ones head and balance- it’s like something is hitting the ‘wall’, then ripping into which is seeminly slowing it's pace. By just shy of the ninth minute Mr Henry has clevery morphed the ‘wall’ into a falling & urgent mixture of juddering & purring bass bound noise that’s knitted by thinner thread of sewing & semi buzzing crisp static- over time the thinner static tonality fades & slowly dies leaving just the bass noise texture. But just when you think it’s going to completly fade out into possible AHNW territory, Mr Henry smashers your ears back with sudden white-out of boiling static walled noise- this sounds like a streaming tropical rain storm….this shift happens just around after the 11 minute mark. The rest of the track finds Mr Henry skilfully shifting from one creative, addictive & brutal ‘walled’ noise texture after another- I wont go into detail about the rest of the track as it will ruin the tracks slow & creative twists ‘n’ turns. Simply put this is a great, skilful, well thought-out & highly creative bit of more active walled noise.
So all told this is a very nicely presented, sharp & arty looking split that offers up one slice of searing, crusty & fixed ‘walled’ noise from Vomir. And another more progressive & active slice of walled noise from Mr Henry….I think sadly this is all out of print now, but this is certainly worth trying to track down on either discogs or eBay….as it’s a great looking & sounding HNW split.