I first came across this unknown artist/group’s music with their debut release under the name “fringe limb”: endling. In a manner similar to Mount Eerie or Magnolia Electric Co. (though the fact that it happened after just one release bears more similarities to Max Nordile’s new Hair Clinic alias), the artist name is now “endling,” and the moniker’s inaugural work is a short one-track album entitled two sides of a fallen mountain. I was initially drawn to the project initially based on the remarkably intriguing and auspicious tags: “collapse,” “decomposition,” “industrial,” “machines,” “musique concrète”—if those aren’t my favorite things to listen to, I don’t know what are—which are still just as representative of this new release, even though it quickly becomes something much more abrasive and extreme than anything on the fringe limb album. The sole track on two sides of a fallen mountain, “b,” is an exemplary piece of nuanced cacophony, with a consistent basis in concrete wreckage and detritus but the staggering, volatile dynamic range of distortion-fueled harshness. The formidable slab of noise wails into existence with violence and chaos, but later in the track it becomes an enveloping mass of sound with that singular psychedelic atmosphere unique to low fidelity harsh noise. Cleaner layers beneath it all frequently make their presence known as they attempt to break through—ritual drones, voice, radio transmissions—but are eventually left to slowly asphyxiate under the unyielding smog.
Noise Not Music 