Calgary’s Met Glas is easily one of the most exciting new voices in noise right now, and even though van Reekum later informed me the material for this new tape on Bent Window was recorded a few years ago and differs from the sound he’s been exploring on stellar recent tapes such as Crooked Like a Dogs’ Hind Legs and Moody Brooding), it should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the project that Out and Out and in Favour of Anythiing is still excellent. Hailing from the other side of the Columbia, Vancouver’s THRTDSPLY brings a slightly more atmospheric presence to the table, even as the almost comically overblown harsh crunches well into the far red; I’m not sure of the exact collaborative process here, whether one artist provided source recordings for the other to manipulate or it was tracked live or a mixture of both, but whatever the case there is a palpable new structural dimension to the rich, crushing analog chaos to which I have quickly become addicted. Throughout “Uselessness on Earth” the immense slabs shift and swell with surprising ease, like ten-ton chunks of bedrock gracefully transported with an elaborate system of pendulums and pulleys, so fluid one barely notices the extent to which the track evolves over its almost-twenty minutes. “Burning Existence” begins with the sound of a quarter-inch cable being plugged directly into your eardrum, your pained request for the proper adapter completely drowned out by yet another surge of righteous distortion, so thick you could cut it with a knife. This one sounds a lot more direct-action/all-hands-on-deck, but again, who knows… can’t think, skull still ringing.
Noise Not Music 