As Bulk Carrier tapes pile up on my shelf like shipping containers on a brine-streaked deck, one has to wonder if such an aesthetically laser-focused project dedicated (recently at least) to decommissioned vessels will itself ever run aground. And then you actually turn on the deck and listen to the latest slabs—in this case, the two sides of Derbyshire—and remember what a load of bilge those doubts are. There is not and has not ever been anyone else whose walls sound like this, slow and hulking with a hard-to-define lifelessness to it all, the dirge of a dead ship slogging. This last quality dominates both Derbyshire and May’s Ojibway, each playing like even more of a eulogy than usual. While the latter carrier was only just taken out of service in 2022, the MV Derbyshire was lost to the maw of the northern Pacific more than four decades ago in 1980, and accordingly the two tracks that comprise the tape seem to yawn from the very depths of the ocean itself, the highs minced to shreds by ruthless pressure and the lows groaning at a register that sounds more tectonic than human-made. Stagnance is the clear structural backbone, but there are always very intentional cracks in the hull that keep things interesting and unpredictable. A watery grave has never been more appealing.
Noise Not Music 