I think my steadily increasing fascination for auditory garbage has formed a terminal trajectory that will end with me abandoning any devotion to coherence—via both input and output—altogether, and I’m just about already there with this new obsession over Strange Mammals of Doom Are Strange 2. Divided into seven untitled tracks, the most recent, partly self-titled offering from anonymous Kraków artist Strange Mammals of Doom is a dark, grimy foray into the murky intersection that connects countless genres of corner-dwelling abstract music. Drone, ersatz electronica, moody dark ambient, humbly cinematic synth, and lurching, lazy, lo-fi wall noise are all crudely yet carefully sculpted into chunks of detritus, mottled driftwood floating on the still surface of a rotting reservoir. These sonic mud-effigies are reliably bizarre and enigmatic, but their specific contours aren’t nearly as consistent: in the first segment moss-choked cavern dross melts into something more melodic, the next embraces the swollen, stubborn stagnancy of amplified electrical currents, and the dense, almost aquatic din of the one after that seems to always be building toward something that it never reaches. And after that there are still four more to go. Are Strange 2 plays like a tinker session somewhere in the depths of a dusty, forgotten electronics depot, and, much like the weird, sleepy supernatural that always seems to lurk in such places, it has lodged its hooks quite deep within me. If only I could, you know, see or feel them. Strange.
Noise Not Music 