Kinda wild that I've been following this noise project for well over twenty years now, as Belltone Suicide's 2001 Armageddon Atropolis debut full-length tape was actually an early Crucial Blast release. I was smitten with Mike Barrett's extreme electronics early on, where the Western Massachusetts native blended the brutal clatter of manhandled scrap metal and storms of extreme feedback with aggressive electronic noise layering - those early works were ferocious. But Barrett would soon move deeper into the realm of sound collage, using found-sound samples to craft dense and often haunting soundscapes and vast ambient works that usually rendered the source material unrecognizable from its original form. But there was always an underlying tendency towards crushing experimental ear-hate lurking right around the corner, as mid-to-late 2000s releases like the hellish glitch-abyss of Cartilage Evaporator and this 2008 entry in the RRRecords Recycled Music Series demonstrated. At his best, Barrett fused his harsher and more aggressive tendencies with his skilled collage techniques to summon lushly layered fields of noise and extrapolated sound, mapping out a bizarre and frequently terrifying topology.

Built with an assortment of recorded raw materials that were collected between 2003 and 2007, the two untitled sides are a little different from the Belltone material I'd picked up from other sources back then, with each twenty-something minute piece disgorging a Dadaist spew of unrecognizable ethnic music, possibly of Middle Eastern origin, with what sound like random burps of television and/or radio transmissions, and grinding loops of distorted noise that coalesce into these awesome no-fi industrialized hypno-grooves. This is racked with sudden eruptions of collapsing debris and metal, grand and terrifying bellowing from deep beneath the surface, these drawn-out sound collages building layers upon layers of chaotic but often rhythmic noise. It's lathered in murky tape hiss and bottom-end heavy rumble, bringing added density to the clipping, squealing squelch-sacpes. More than once, Barrett summons up something that will make my eyes roll back into my head and have me swooning to and fro as those loops dig out from underneath the chaos and random environmental noises and hijacked voices that are stripped of any and all linguistic substance. It's great. This tape has that kind of scattered surrealism that reminds me of a lot of Merzbow's mid-80s output as well as what Nurse With Wound was doing. But this stuff is coming from a different, more demented corner of a dank, dirty basement, with cheapo Casio bossa-nova rhythms sometimes hissing underneath electronic hum, and bits of almost musical form taking shape for a second before being blown back out the door, or stretches of bizarre electro-acoustic fuckery that defy interpretation, or choirs of malfunctioning computer machinery in active revolt, or squalls of possible poltergeist communiqués. Like I said, it's great.

Cobbled and sculpted from a mix of guitar pedals, shortwave radio transmissions, bass guitar, and pre-recorded music, Belltone Suicide's infectiously loopy noise feels like bursts of something from a parallel dimension. I love it, the messy dreamlike etherealness of what's drifting off of these magnetic spools, sometimes primal and even comical, other times scathing and slightly intimidating. Grinding distorted guitar-like fuzz, lunatic ghostscapes. Random collisions of disparate circuitry. Roars of distant collapsing mountain ranges. Putrid tape-warble and cassette entanglement. Technoid beats doing battle with tentacles of squamous feedback. Psychedelic hyper-garble. A myriad effects pedals lined through each other into a barbarous signal loop. Blurts of hilarious scatological squelch and noxious potentially organic audio-crud. Never a dull moment.

In time-honored Recycled Music fashion, the cassette is in duct tape covered, hand-written packaging.