With their 2018 self-titled debut tape, Double Goocher Shop established a definitive and compelling approach rooted in the space where the two members’ aesthetic interests intersect. Throughout their respective careers, Renato Grieco and Moss Hopkins have both plumbed the fecund depths of text-sound, concrète music, tape assemblage, and field recording to achieve singular ends—Grieco’s work brings to mind the complex, theatrical “cinéma pour l’oreille” of the tradition’s pioneering composers with a modern twist; Hopkins’s is more domestic, introspective, self-conscious—but their ongoing collaborative project proves how complementary those ends are. Radio Carrion is their first material since The Kaplan Text back in 2021 and sees the pair diving into the paranormal currents of their sound that had previously only been implicit. The technique of using shortwave radio to make contact with the dead (or otherwise ontologically displaced) is a familiar one, both in experimental music specifically and ghost-hunting in general, but here the artists engage with a meta dimension to the practice as they investigate the “anthropological hoax” of the concept of the supernatural itself. Though humbly distinguished with mere numbers, each “Finding” is a mesmerizing and well-structured shadow-world, a promising new lead in the duo’s cryptic investigation. #1 tugs at the veil with speech dissections, motheaten piano gloom, and wisps of electromagnetic interference; #2 lets us waltz through a flooded cathedral. The casual, assured sparseness of the compositions is what makes them so harrowing. A rustle here, a few footsteps there, and all the thick grey nothing in between. We create our own hauntings. #13 is like a nightmare with an oddly hopeful ending, capping off this stellar CD (that gets better with every play) with an invitation to stay forever.
Noise Not Music 