Phil Blankenship's long running harsh noise project The Cherry Point is one of my favorite purveyors of "wall noise", though that's hardly the entirety of his work. The Black Witchery and Night Of The Bloody Tapes discs continue to hold a high position on my personal HN charts, and are continuously recommended to anyone in pursuit of an extreme harsh electronics fix. There's been a shitload of stuff that Blankenship has released with Cherry Point that I've totally missed out on, though, so it's nice to come across a reissue of something as skull-wrecking as Misery Guts, an older 2004 release that I never had a chance to hear in its original form. Released on tape by the now defunct label Since 1972, Misery Guts is primo noise punishment that comes in at just under half an hour.

The two long untitled tracks that make up Misery Guts are violent, relentless maelstroms of noise, shifting between brutal feedback whipping wildly around seething masses of high end chirping and crushing torrents of junk-noise awash in currents of thick acrid static, to massive metallic rumblings and ominous molten power-drones buried beneath an avalanche of collapsing concrete, glass and metal. The junk-noise aspect is a big part of this recording, and it's as brutal as anything that contempos like Hal Hutchinson and Linekraft have been dishing out lately. Both tracks really deliver, interspersing blocks of rhythmic static and mechanical noise with the collapsing metal carnage, moving through a number of distinct passages that keep cranking up the sonic extremity. At times this sounds like an entire factory district being torn apart by some monstrous beast, a wave of deafening destruction bathed in radioactive fire, field recordings of a metropolis burning in the wake of a 50 megaton nuclear blast.

Reissued by Troniks in jewel case packaging in an edition of five hundred copies.