Many, including me, are drawn to cut-up for not just the exhilarating pace and gestural kinesis, but also the intentionality; few other noise subgenres are as directly reliant upon the artist’s mastery of their own equipment and the musical vision they set out to accomplish. But what happens when the wracking blasts of distortion and cross-stereo jumping become more incidental than intentional, as if the gear itself is internally disintegrating, spitting out the textural equivalent of catastrophic error codes through overblown speakers? This is no hypothetical—Dépaysement’s new C20 Tulpa fully embraces such a messy, volatile approach, the assaults of crunching harsh constantly cracking under their own weight and crumbling into swaths of pensive nature recordings and sighs of fraught ambience. It’s one of those tapes that is strangely satisfying precisely because it seems to outright reject any sort of conventional satisfaction: the loud parts are gone as soon as they arrive, the quieter stretches refuse to resolve or climb toward a climax; listening is like trying to scale a jagged, landslide-prone mountain that actively resists your very presence. But at the same time there’s a certain logic at work, one that reveals an aesthetic purpose not immediately obvious. It’s about unpredictability, the excitement of being completely uncertain what will happen next. That bubbling brook/contact-mic shuffle duet in “Skin” draws ears into a false stasis that exists only to be broken, while the delicate drone of the latter half of “Visage” does the exact opposite, leading up to something that never actually happens. As much frustration as there is fulfillment: a lost art in noise these days.
Noise Not Music 