Wreck and Reference
Black Cassette
Read the article about this on the excellent Lurker and barely finished reading before I jumped to download it. It's Metal of many kinds with no guitars, a “DIY electronic Doom band” crafting “wastelands of sonic chaos and despair”; it's digital noise formed into blackened metal shapes overshadowed by the hand of doom. It has a sense of the industrial about it, but not Industrial; the electronics providing electrical charge, thunderstorms of crackling intensity. The vocals sound a lot like David Tibet, a haunted nasal form of rhythmic speech, intoned with holy menace and latent grandiosity. You might have to be told that the wall of roaring static pouring from the speakers come from key-tones rather than steel string abuse so stylistically textural is the sound, yet in a similar way to how Servile Sect suck up Metal and Atmosphere and produce something alien sounding out of the familiar, Wreck and Reference also produce a parallel take on metal and subvert the pre-requisite set-up for producing it in the process. There's shades of the shadowy Menace Ruine about the smoky shapes blown out of the atmospheres. A thick, tense and tangible threatening presence.
The dark storm of All The Ships Have Been Abandoned crashes waves of rousing noise against a titanic beat then stutters to a climax building a rockier groove into its spaces. In Chains starts with furious drumming that smooths down to a thick bass tom beat for the veils of noise to descend over them, vocals and keys soaring upwards to meet another euphorically bleak wall of crashing turbulence. The finale is one of the most powerfully stirring pieces of music you might hear all year; concluding the record's existential themes of human futility and finity in a simultaneous maelstrom of all emotion as waves of bliss stained bleakness crash and flutter into cosmic oblivion.
This release isn't just digital, and if all 50 copies of the cassette tape haven't sold out already listening to this should not take long to convince you to own it. Tapes come in black hand sewn cloth sleeve with lyric insert. The band are currently working towards a full length album, but this release should easily sustain you for longer than they might possibly take to record it.
On another head-spinning note, it turns out that one half of the duo – Ignat - used to be in a band called Bison who pre-empted Women's post-Sonic Youth textural strung out rock musics by about two years with an excellent demo and the track Painted Gold which I played to death in the early days of NFR. Amazing.
The dark storm of All The Ships Have Been Abandoned crashes waves of rousing noise against a titanic beat then stutters to a climax building a rockier groove into its spaces. In Chains starts with furious drumming that smooths down to a thick bass tom beat for the veils of noise to descend over them, vocals and keys soaring upwards to meet another euphorically bleak wall of crashing turbulence. The finale is one of the most powerfully stirring pieces of music you might hear all year; concluding the record's existential themes of human futility and finity in a simultaneous maelstrom of all emotion as waves of bliss stained bleakness crash and flutter into cosmic oblivion.
This release isn't just digital, and if all 50 copies of the cassette tape haven't sold out already listening to this should not take long to convince you to own it. Tapes come in black hand sewn cloth sleeve with lyric insert. The band are currently working towards a full length album, but this release should easily sustain you for longer than they might possibly take to record it.
On another head-spinning note, it turns out that one half of the duo – Ignat - used to be in a band called Bison who pre-empted Women's post-Sonic Youth textural strung out rock musics by about two years with an excellent demo and the track Painted Gold which I played to death in the early days of NFR. Amazing.
