Somewhere in between the homemade industrial gristle of Wolf Eyes, damaged basement black metal ambience and the mysterious blackened textures of Prurient's recent output, you'll find the strange midnight noise rituals of Fire Island, AK, a project from South Carolina noise artist Thomas Boetnner. I just recently discovered his stuff after he got in touch with us to see if we'd be interested in carrying his music, which is released in tiny handmade runs on his own label, sometimes in editions of less than twenty copies. Once I started checking his stuff out, I found it to be pretty fascinating; using a variety of instruments, electronics and found objects, Boettner creates extremely eerie and abstract soundscapes of blackened old-school industrial, minimal drone and some grisly ambient skronk that reminds me of a murkier, evil sounding version of the Japanese improv-jazz-noise group Dislocation. It's really cool stuff that occasionally stumbles into passages of filthy black ambient brilliance. We picked up a bunch of the Fire Island, AK releases as well as a tape that Boettner released under his own name; all of this stuff is pretty rad, fans of disquieting graveyard drift and occult basement industro-buzz should check this guy out.

I'm not exactly sure what the distinction is between this cassette released under Thomas Boettner's own name and the material released through his solo noise project Fire Island, AK, as the Guilt cassette really isn't all that far removed from Fire Island's grimy low-fi noise. For whatever reason, this is the one cassette put out through Boetnner's own B.T.N.R. imprint that�s not under his Fire Island, AK moniker. Guilt features ten tracks of murky harsh noise, long stretches of droning black static a la Werewolf Jerusalem, short bursts of violent power electronics, and occasionally distorted almost black metallish shrieks appear through the fog of tape hiss and distortion. The tracks move between twisted melodic abstraction and full-tilt noise, which Boettner creates with a combination of guitars, synths, samplers, tapes, metal, power tools and effects pedals. I think that one of the main things that distinguishes this from the Fire Island stuff is the use of samples; Boettner takes a kind of plunderphonic approach with several of these tracks, taking short samples from Black Flag, NON, Scott Walker and Nashville chanteuse Skeeter Davis and warping/disfiguring them into melodic loops and smears of distorted sound, which are sometimes identifiable, sometimes not. The last track "What Angel Is Carried Hidden In Your Cheek?" is the most overt piece of plunderphonic mashup on the tape, where fragments of music from most of those artists are layered together to form a woozy, hallucinatory sound-collage that sounds like a warped Southern waltz. An interesting mixture of plunderphonic collage, blackened power electronics and static drone-noise that I suppose is fairly different from the rest of Boettner�s catalog, now that I�ve listened to it a few times. The tape comes in a handmade package with full color artwork that borrows imagery from Haxan: Witchcraft Through The Ages, and is hand-numbered and limited to 100 copies.