The past year (we're talking 2006-2007 here) has produced a phenomenal brood of albums that have harnessed the most brutal strains of feedback and sculpted

them into slabs of crushing, monolithic un-rock corrosion...Skullflower's Tribulation, a large portion of the stuff coming out on the At War With

False Noise cd-r imprint, and all of the awesome wall-noise discs that Troniks has been cranking out immediately spring to mind. Obviously this approach is

rooted in the head-splitting frequencies of classic Power Electronics and Matt Bower's TOTAL, but there's also a sense that there are riffs buried

somewhere deep in the churning storms of distortion and feedback, which adds a whole 'nother level of heaviness to these newer "noise" releases. The

Finnish artists Gelsomina and Cloama themselves both work with this kind of crushing amplifier damage, and for The Duelists they've teamed up to

sculpt a four-part monument of shrieking feedback manipulation, thunderous lower-frequency amplifier drone, and buried, subliminal melodies...Gelsomina's

material is in the left channel, and Cloama's in the right. Cloama I'm not familiar with, this collab is the first time I've heard anything from that

project...Gelsomina, on the other hand, is a noise fave over here, his assorted CDs and CD-Rs on the Freak Animal imprint have all been excellent feedback

battles. These lengthy tracks don't stray too far from Gelsomina's normal m.o., which is basically high volume blasts of feedback in a turbulent maelstrom

underpinned by occasional grinding, low-end amp-sludge drones, but there are also alot of fragmented melodic figures and malformed quasi-riffs that appear,

especially in the final, epic 17 minute track that creates cloudbreaks of haunting ambience in the middle of the wall-of-noise chaos. Powerful, psychedelic

amplifier terror from the cold dark north. This disc was issued in a limited, hand-numbered edition of 300, and is presented in an oversized, full-color A5

sleeve housed in a plastic sheath.