TEETH COLLECTION "Fire Mouth/Smoke Breather" (Longlongchaney)

The mistakes of lo-fidelity recording become the techniques of high fidelity composing on this hypnotizer. The pulsing that drives "Fire Mouth" moves back and forth between overly compressed lo end and peaking the red distortion that is neither loping nor repetitive. The compelling narrative of this interplay then moves into a world of over the top echoing, not to be unexpected from this prolific act that focuses on home-made reverb chambers. Thinking about the landfill of droney cassettes being made these days is one of my least favorite pass times. I absolutely love great drone, but with so much "just plug the delay pedal in and moan" shit going on, I am typically uninterested in checking new acts describing themselves this way. But an act like Teeth Collection is why I remain such a huge drone fan. Not that I expect Teeth Collection to be self-proclaimed drone. The hippy noise world I think has entrenched the word drone in such an aesthetic purity that music this interesting and aesthetically diverse is no longer a part of the club... both by art dogma and well needed politics. But now that I've dragged Teeth Collection well into my own agenda without their consent, I'll get back to why this particular tape rules hard. "Smoke Breather" succeeds in the same way as "Fire Mouth." While the masterful narrative of the piece moves from one world of timbre to an entirely different one (here from near-wall harshness to completely vacant bottom tones), the atmospheric function of the sounds remains similar the whole way through. Despite the great difference in sounds within each piece, the mood is kept uniform. It is in this way that a I argue a true DRONE is created; a hypnotizing of the listener that is just using the right amount of dynamics to keep your ears awake. It is there that so much drone fails, in that is just is beddy-bye music. Teeth Collection will put you under a spell, not just make you pass out completely.