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BASTARD NOISE  Live At Babycastles  CD   (Small Doses)   11.98


��� As much as I love the full-band, weirdo prog-core stuff that Eric Wood has been doing with Bastard Noise in recent years, there's definitely nothing quite like the cosmic terror that the guy is able to whip up with his full-on "caveman electronics" style noisescapes. And that's the territory that we find the band in with this new disc. The seemingly ever-shifting lineup of Bastard Noise evolves once again for this live album, which features Wood teaming up with noise artist Anthony Saunders, who some of you might remember from his crazed digital grindcore band Dataclast that appeared on one of Crucial Blast's earliest releases. Babycastles consists of a single forty-minute piece titled "Alien Mother Nest / Space Graves" that the duo recorded live in New York City in 2014. You probably wouldn't even know that this is a live album from listening to it, though, as the sound quality is great and the group's electronic assault gets pretty massive after the long, slow build across the first third of the disc.

��� With "Nest", these guys are in no rush to assault the listener. The first several minutes of the set is all slow-burn celestial drift, slowly undulating waves of distorted drone shifting across a spacious black expanse as eerie electronic cries sound from far off in the distance, and glimmering sine-waves and high-end tones dot the rumbling, sprawling driftscape. As the performance progresses, though, other more abrasive sounds slowly begin to descend upon their thrumming electric field, high distressing feedback tones hovering endlessly over the approach of jittering machine-like noises and more of those weird distant electronic shrieks. The layered sounds become more intricate as they sculpt their noise into an symphony of tortured engines and squealing test-tones, everything clouded by heavy doses of reverb, building into a squirming, howling mass of menacing vermiform electronics punctuated with increasingly violent blasts of monstrous metallic roar, unseen power tool rituals, and avalanches of corroded sheet metal. Abrasive chirping glitchery swarms like gusts of ravenous bio-mech insects sweeping down and around the lifeless factory pulse and collapsing metal forms that loom over the final ten minutes of the set. It's an exquisitely crafted blast of malevolent alien drone, one of the more "ambient" Bastard Noise recordings of late, but underscored with plenty of that roaring mutant heaviness and cyborg / caveman psychedelia that we know and love. Comes in gatefold packaging.


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