TASKMASTER "Get Dead" (Rundownsun)

So Rundownsun puts out the most consistently elegant cassettes in the underground these days. They’re seriously beautiful, well designed, well dubbed. This Taskmaster tape, however, bothers the hell out of me. Not because it isn’t good—it is. But within the folds of the nicely screened j-card is a copy of a permit to cultivate marijuana in Canada. What the hell? This is harsh noise. You’re not in Smegma, dude. I don’t care if you smoke weed, I just don’t wanna know about it. The downfall of the wall aesthetic may very well be brought about by an association with stoney space-out jammyness. We shouldn’t be able to credit the noise’s unchanging nature to the fact that its creator is blazed out of his gourd and forgot to twist the knobs. Anyway: the tape itself is really damned good. It sounds fucking huge. Side B, especially, sounds like a nuclear holocaust observed from hundreds of miles away.

WEREWOLF JERUSALEM "Surrounded By Fangs" (Rundownsun)

Apt artwork—the j-card: mostly white. The noise: mostly white. While everyone in noise hops on the “total crunch obsession” bandwagon, Richard Ramirez’s Werewolf Jerusalem project spends two sides of this c26 investigating the nature of hiss. The sound source for these pieces seems to be white noise (in the mathematical sense, as opposed to the Don DeLillo sense) which is altered slightly throughout. Ramirez brings up certain frequency ranges, distorts them, pulls out others—it’s all quite subtle. Hiss, a nice EQ, some compression—which is to say that I like it quite a bit. It is an unusual sound, not something most harsh heads are interested in these days, but becomes quite haunting and evocative in its own windy way. Super highly recommended.