It shouldn’t be a surprise to see yet another wall noise album at the top of this page. At this point 2021 seems fully incapable of disappointing me in this regard; a small sliver of the pie, no doubt, but I’ll take whatever size piece I can get. Despair in the Gutter I, a new release from prolific Ontario project Death Glaze—which I know next to nothing about—is somewhat of a midpoint between the last two I wrote about (Being the Contents of an Unsigned Letter and 136), seething in a spiny mass of squealing, crunching transmission sputter and fuzz-poisoned punctures. “Creature of Evil” could be an unruly symphony of missed or faulty audio-cable connections; each of its multifarious parts, carefully spread across the full range of the stereo field, is its own source point of disorderly rake and rattle, one of many in a haphazard, anti-Cartesian grid of barbed wire and rusted spikes. “Sex Worker Prey,” like many B-side walls, very much feels like a continuation or reimagining of a similar idea: the distortion is fuller, more shrouding, but it fills the spaces between the aforementioned micro-sites rather than draping itself over them completely, retaining the detailed, piecemeal structure of agitation of the preceding track while offering something new and contrastive. Ever wanted to know how your bottle of detergent feels as it rattles around on the sharp metal top of your washer/dryer unit before falling off and spilling its viscous liquid contents everywhere? Now you can.
Noise Not Music 