Joshua Norton Cabal/Malpa – Split
This is a 20 minutes cassette, tem minutes a piece. Joshua Norton Cabal, I project I was unfamiliar with previous to this, fills theirs with two tracks. “The Digestive Tracts of Humans” combines harsh textures with a looping, rhythmic construction and incorporates some odd off kilter textures into the mix to give it a unique feel. It’s abrasive yet whimsical almost due to the swirling throb. The tone shifts from grinding to more ambient, loud to quiet and shows a lot of movement. “Learning The Art of Self Isolation Within The Science of Self Preservation” is next, harsh stumbling distortions, steady white noise sweeps, and a drunken mix of swelling noise, silence, ambient tones and rhythmic loops create a staggered flow that makes for a intriguing end result. The sounds here are potent in all their forms, but it’s the mix and movement that I think really makes what Joshua Norton Cabal is doing so interesting, very good stuff. Malpa gets 4 tracks on his side of the split beginning with “Bantu.” Crisp, saturating distortion lays an almost Death Industrial like foundation, were it not for its erratic pulsing and abrupt shifts. A piercing high feedback emerges above this along with flanged out squalls of noise. “Feline-ing” is a more aggressively mixed piece, heavy low end tones throb at the base with some nice mid and hi end accents moving through the mix that aren’t overly distorted and give a delightfully awkward quality to everything. “Why” features chipmunk style pitch shifted vocals/samples chattering away amid a disorderly flurry of noise, and feedback that fluctuates and wobbles in its intensity. “Outro” is the final piece a slow reverberating drone piece that builds into a cycling grind and diminishes. I think the thing I liked about this the most was the variation and use of different types of sounds and construction to create something more uncomfortable and odd than you might have expected. Really enjoyable all around. – Scott
DADA DRUMMING
Worm Gear 