Review: Tinnitustimulus – Fountain (Fecund, Jul 17)

For nearly two decades now, Providence-based artist Tomas Bennett has been making some of the most uncompromising harsh noise in the game as Tinnitustimulus. In addition to following through on the project’s eponymous promise—most of his work features frequencies that will shred your eardrums if you’re not careful—Bennett has always been inclined toward long, droning compositions that induce a punishing kind of hypnosis. You can hear this interest as far back as 2015’s Roquefort, but it’s especially present on recent releases like Omnipresence and Vortices. It dovetails with a parallel interest in stripping down his setup, which these days often consists of a laptop, an interface, and a mixer. Accordingly, the back of the O-card for Fountain, the first tape on a new presumably in-house imprint Fecund, frankly states that “No acoustic feedback was used in these recordings.” Both sides are filled with undammed, unbroken surges of noise, almost numbing in their monolithic monotony. The commitment to sustained feedback studies reminds me of the Agitant Group tape on Head Meat from last year, but of course this is strictly digital. That being said, the analog presentation softens the edges a bit, slathering a topcoat of murk that serves as a nice complement to the serrated layers as they phase in and out. Somehow Bennett always knows the perfect moments to tweak his overloaded systems so that they start to thrash and fracture, threatening to tear themselves apart but never quite breaking the surface tension of the relentless current—that is, until the very end of the B side, which makes it all the more satisfying.