Portraits of American Firing Squads
The Eternal Fear
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Family In The Armed Forces
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Two albums released last year as free downloads from Portraits of American Firing Squads, eight tracks in total, of densly coruscating wordless political invective from the Brooklyn based Austyn Sullivan. There's a deep metallic clanging to the core of these pieces, like a steel skeleton onto which the movement of the pieces are thrown over, billowing fuzz and chattering static. Similar sounds to those in the white-out pale-noise records of Belong, Loscil and Kevin Drumm,the sense of placid violence in the flow of tortured noise reminds me of the Monsters Build Mean Robots album of a few years ago that was similarly themed - an almost wordless electronic/post-rock album burning with composed rage, that offered sober yet emboldening music dealing with global politics. Sullivan's work is far more specifically American-centric, and with him originally hailing from New Orleans there is ample fuel for his ire at the aggressive neglect his nation's military operates, without valuing its own people as well as the rest of the world.
Despite the themes of violence there is no sadism in this noise it is often beautiful and luxurious sounding, instead of twisted blasted-Earth carnage to illustrate the themes it goes the opposite direction offering an ethereal, almost intangible counterpoint; the opening Our Attempts to Exist an aquatic sounding piece that ripples and distorts like shafts of light refracting through water, rising and falling on a heaving sigh of melody. There are drums buried into The Eternal Fear and they start to appear on the radiant highlight For Undiplomatic Firing Squads, amorphous and indistinct like the approaching march of some gathering force somewhere off the horizon, their distant threat still enough to stir a greater sense of tension.
Two vey excellent albums of involving spatial ambience that should be making there wasy to you d/l folder now.
