Review: Rural Tourniquet – Let the Animals Scatter the Remains (Anti-Everything, Mar 15)

Rural Tourniquet, a trio on whom information is sparse other than that it appears to share members with Indiana outsider collective Crazy Doberman, conjure uncanny, apocalyptic soundscapes with their atmosphere-focused approach to improvisation on Let the Animals Scatter the Remains. The group stitches together grating violin abuse, shifting electronic textures, piercing feedback, gurgling mouth sounds, and a host of other gleefully plundered sonorities, weaving a lush but broken tapestry of waste and desolation. In my review of Timothée Quost and Jaka Berger’s collaboration, I discussed collective improvisation as offering a possibility for a sonic result that’s less of a parsable conversation and more of a single cacophony from multiple sources. That couldn’t ring more true here; despite Rural Tourniquet being comprised of three members, it moves its pieces along with the focus and harmony of a lone entity, whipping skin-crawling textures into frenzied tornadoes, bolstering strings as harrowing as Penderecki’s with menacing hums and unsettlingly organic textures, bringing the whole thing to an unlikely close in an acid cloud of reverb and restless scrapes.