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ASTRONOMY  A Rough Science  CASSETTE   (Institute For Organic Conversations)   5.98


This tape just came in with the pile of Wilt-related releases that showed up this week, a 90 minute cassette from a project called Astronomy that I can only guess is a side project of James Keeler of Wilt, who runs the Institute For Organic Conversations label that this was released on. The full color artwork for the tape depicts a cosmic expanse dotted with asteroids floating through the void, and the look of it had me thinking that the music contained inside was going to be some sort of cosmic drone or similiar ambience. Astronomy's sound is cosmic alright, but this is anything but drone - each side of the tape unleashes a massive wall of brutally dense and churning psychedelic noise filled with half-glimpsed riffs, waves of crushing distortion, amorphous rhythmic pulses and massive buried beats. It sounds like it could have been formed by layering hundred and hundreds of black metal samples on top of each other, which wouldn't be too surprising given Keeler's appropriati

on of metal forms for his crushing noise/drone scultpures in Wilt. But again, who knows who is actually behind this project and what the sound materials used to create it are...there's no information on Astronomy to be found anywhere online, and the tape itself is devoid of information or text of any kind aside from the Institute label info and logo. All we're left with is a massive blast of ultra heavy psych-wall that sounds like CCCC mixed with The Rita that roars off of the cassette tape at spine-destroying volume.