Another of the more obscure artists featured in Handmade Bird's recent "Yellow Series - Critical Fabric" run of cassettes, Dagger follows suit alongside J S H, Vomir, and The Rita with an expansive blast of "harsh noise wall"-style black static. Following a plethora of super-limited tapes issued on reliable labels like Cruel Symphonies, Deathbed, and Putrescent Tapes, "Deadly Transmission” appears to be one epic-length piece of noise construction; I saw somewhere online that at least some of the source material behind this two-part distortion bomb comes from the even more obscure direct-to-video Jim Wynorski horror flick 976-EVIL Part 2 from 1992. Dunno if that's factual, but it's an interesting idea; there's a tradition of "HNW" artists mining horror and splatter films for core sound samples for harsh noise "tributes". This strain of gore-cult creativity was common among the likes of Cory Strand / Altar Of Waste, and the much-missed Worthless Recordings label, who all put out a ton of stuff in that vein. And me being a horror film fanatic, well, that kind of shit definitely scratches a weird itch.

Anyways, "Deadly Transmission" is primo black static with a churning sub-layer of scraping, clanking activity and electro-acoustic violence; this definitely does not share the meditatative qualities of, say, Vomir, no dissolution of self in the high-volume, beyond-blinding white-hot supernova of extreme speaker overload. At least on "Deadly", the first half delivers a maelstrom of high-detail crackling carnage that puts it alongside the likes of Richard Ramirez and Black Leather Jesus, Macronympha, and Skin Crime. An ever-present roar of bass-heavy distortion sweeps across the world, but it's constantly strafed and scraped and slashed with abrupt clots of mangled signal-fuck and brutal waveform deformation. Real classic FX pedal-crusher vibe going on with this. I've been gravitating lately more and more to this kind of fried-out, super-dense harsh noise that drops a "wall" on your skull but keeps it evolving and mutating throughout the entire recording, and Dagger does just that. I've no idea if or when any sound elements of the aforementioned 976-EVIL Part 2 appear on this tape (there are some extremely buried samples and voices scattered through the recording, but these are just more smears of chaos amid the endless thunder), I'm just bathing in an endless avalanche of delectable ultra-distortion flecked with those blasts of skree, garble, and barely perceptible rhythmic form. This chaotic element dissipates across the second half, as Dagger's smoldering speaker-shred melts into something a bit more mesmeric, but there's always more happening here than just static. It's like what I imagine the sun might sound like once you're close enough to hear it, in that impossibly brief moment when all the devastating, roiling, incomprehensible solar fury can actually be heard, before the previously solid/liquid matter that had been your physical form would instantly become lower-density gas. One can dream.

Dagger certainly brings a sense of "flow" to this nearly hour-long experience.

As with the other tapes in Handmade Birds' beautifully designed "Critical Fabric - Yellow Series" (of which this tape is letter "I") , the tape comes in a regular case and j-card, but is housed in a larger slipcase along with rolled fabric material, craft paper, tags, and other physical detritus specific to this series / release.