In a recent interview for Mortar, DMV-area noise booking agent Chris Griffiths spoke about the excitement of hosting artists for their first gigs with a pro PA: “They’re learning how to work with heavy feedback. They’re discovering the gut-punch lows of a good subwoofer. And once they’ve heard it that way, they’re hungry to make it sound as potent as possible.” One of these newcomers that cut their teeth on the hulking speakers at DC’s own Rhizome space is Levogyre, a pair of local heads with a shared hunger for cranked volume and crushing textures. They made their New York debut a few weeks ago on a Dead Gods bill, delivering a searing heavy electronics set about which my only complaint was that it was too short. Their second tape Hysteresis documents the rapid maturation of their sound, a marked improvement over the already solid debut C20 they put out last year. The material is sharper and more active; the duo are still masters of the seething slow build, but shorter tracks like “Solar Maxima” are an opportunity to work up whirlwind assaults of stabbing feedback and pedal-crunched scrap metal abuse. There’s a looseness to the A side that I really enjoy, like they’re using everything on the workbench and seeing what sticks while still managing to sculpt it all into engaging compositions. The “Hysteresis” diptych adds some shifty psychedelic tape work to the mix, setting the stage for the slow-motion mushroom cloud of “It Contains Within Itself Everything Necessary for Its Own Existence.” This one is closest to their live set, an insistent climb toward chaos, and when it gets there you wish it would go on forever. Hysteresis is one of those tapes where the only thing more exciting than hearing it is thinking about what the project will do next.
Copies of both Hysteresis and the self-titled C20 are available via email: levogyre@proton.me.
Noise Not Music 