Maybe it’s fortuitous that I’ve just returned from the dentist as I
write this – my upper left gums are still numb, even – but man, I’m on track 2,
“Millipede in a Doll’s House,” and I can’t shake that it’s really similar to
what I’ve just experienced. My dentist is great – we get to listen to Pandora
on Bluetooth headphones to block out the mania happening in our mouths – and
today I listened to the classical music station while all that drilling was
going on. Drill, air, suck, drill, adhere with ultraviolet bonding agents (!) –
the noise and the music converge within my head and become a new, spontaneous
composition, right there in the dentist’s office. If you’re a fan of music, in
general, you listen for those moments, and you grab them and try to make sense
of them if you can.
Let’s get it straight – I’m not saying Grey Guides sounds like a
dentist’s drill in your head – far from that. What I’m interested in is the
combination of noise sources with some sort of buried traditional
instrumentation as a backbone, or even just the strict result of carefully
crafted sound art. Whether sampled or not, some distorted guitar and/or bass
can be found in “Millipede,” among other tracks, but the manipulation and
experimentation of tracks like “One Eye Lower than the Other” and “Just Burned
Down a Care Home,” where sounds are warped and layered to unsettling effect,
are the stars of the awesomely titled Beast
Mask Supremacist. What are these sources, and how are the deployed? No
idea. That’s part of the fun.
I mean, “The Thing That Took the Ball Away” is a nightmare waiting to
pry open your imagination (maybe in some sort of It-like game, speaking of all the clown chaos happening at the
moment – current events!). It’s belligerently atonal, and there are muffled and
indecipherable voices that pierce the madness here and there. Grey Guides even
shows their hand somewhat on the half-obviously titled “Van Hoogstraten’s Big
Pay-Back / Gorton Poltergeist Revisited,” on which spirits flutter and howl and
terrorize until you’re a big goopy puddle of fear in the middle of your rec
room (because you have a rec room in this scenario, for some reason). “Yoo Doo
Rite / Mr Pharmacist” does the ol’ Shining
bit one different, where instead of music from the 1920s piping in from
another dimension through the haze, we get a bit of rock and roll doing the
same thing. That makes more sense in this scenario – the ghost we perceive
isn’t one to benignly observe; rather, we have to duck our heads and run for
cover as it comes at us in a moment of great malevolence. Well, that’s just
what I’m getting from the sonic combination – at least I’m cavity free at the
moment, if I want to look on the bright side.
--Ryan Masteller
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