THING

With this twelfth edition, attenuation circuit continues its series of four-way split albums called THING. The aim is to provide a medium for exchange and presentation of a great variety of artists. As each artist spreads the copies to their network, listeners also get to know the other artists featured on the same disc. The title references the fact that the CDs are physical objects – things! – but also refers to the 'thing' or 'ding' in old Norse and other Germanic languages, which designates the place of a popular assembly or the assembly itself and thus alludes to the 'meeting-place' character of the albums on (or around) which the four artists and their audiences meet, if only virtually.

For this decidedly harsh noise edition of the THING series which showcases the many facets of this supposedly reductionist genre, two noise acts from Slovenia (Sist En 343 and Lord Sonervol) are joined by attenuation circuit label head Sascha Stadlmeier in his EXEDO incarnation, reserved for his harsh noise work, and his local colleague Gerald Fiebig. The latter opens his track (and the album), rather atypical for a noise release, with the unprocessed sample of a complete, yet short poem by his late poet friend Carl E. Ricé (‚Ash-green leaf / fleeing skyward / invisible to the eye / in ultraviolet hope / a puking something follows / me around // „I“‘). The poem suggests hopelessness while simultaneously struggling against it simply by being written, refusing to give up just yet, and as such it sums up what a lot of noise music is about. After all, not only Sist En 343, but quite a few noise artists would agree they were „influenced by the ugliness of the harsh reality of the (post) industrial world“ – but in Sist En 343‘s live recording the groping for a possible exit, the attempts at finding a strategy for fighting the fire of the capitalist world with the gasoline of noise, can be heard in an exemplary way, as we witness a build-up from tortured squeaking feedbacks into a fully developed wall of noise. EXEDO’s track further cements that wall while also keeping the sonic mass vibrating just enough so you never forget that you cannot trust anything, not even a wall you have built yourself. Lord Sonervol seem to answer to the poem that opened the album not only with the negativity of their track title „No Mans Land, No Ones Future“, but also with the melancholic mood they manage to introduce into their walls of distortion.

File under: harsh noise