With two tapes under his belt as Wasauksing Sniper, a project dedicated to the legendary Ojibwe marksman Francis Pegahmagabow, Winnipeg’s Bret Parenteau had already set a precedent for gritty, glacial heavy electronics steeped in the sediment of history and the dust of recycled tape. But Ghost in the Trenches, a follow-up to Western Front (which also gave the artist’s in-house imprint its name) takes things to a new level. These new recordings are dynamic and deliberate in their structures, in a way that past releases weren’t. That’s not a dig, don’t get me wrong; I was a huge fan of the seething slow-burns well before this one made it into the deck. There’s just a lot more to sink your teeth into here, without compromising the lumbering, almost pensive pace. In “Into the Ground,” Parenteau raises a swirling twister of feedback from the ravaged earth of no-man’s land and then minces it into a brutal, crunchy wall, terraforming the blast sites and foxholes like churning tank treads. The plod pays off, too, when ripping distortion drags the rumble into higher registers—now the air is on fire. The next two shorter cuts make room for concentrated texture worship: “Plunder at Night” is some of the harshest material yet, and “A Shot from the Hole” plays with repetitive swells before collapsing into all-out howl. And then there’s the title track, which takes up the entirety of side B and reaches blood-boiling levels of intensity. I don’t want to spoil too much… you just gotta listen. I have a feeling this is a tape that will find a lot of new ears.
Copies are available via email: wasauksingsniper@outlook.com.
Noise Not Music 