As Weird as Iowa

Black Drink – s/t
SickSickSick #40
www.sicksicksickdistro.com



I don’t know much about this group, except that it includes someone from USAisamonster. It’s not important, though – this is crucial late-night trance listening, mixing elements of noise, free jazz, and world music to spooky, tense effect.

Side A opens with a ratatatat that quickly subsides to a subtly inorganic tone with cymbals, Zen bells and flutes that fold in upon themselves to feed back into a rising pulse. Something slow and heavy and not quite round starts moving around underneath your ears. There’s a taste of harshness – wheezing electricity playing off clattering drums. But everything is incredibly restrained, even when there’s static involved. Things are so nearly empty here – rainsticks gently drip and shake while UFOs contemplate, low to high. Things again very, very slowly pick up steam; there are metallic, toneless bells echoing against minimal plucked notes, things start to once again fold in on themselves, you get the sense that you’re going somewhere, chugging along, chugging, echoing, pulsing, whispers building on whispers -

AAAaaaand there’s where my sole critique of this release kicks in – the side change comes right in the middle of a buildup! I’d rather have a long silence at the end of side B than that kind of interruption in my listening, especially when it’s this kind of headphone-y music.

As Side B opens, we have the same tribal drums, simple, low, and the keening, funereal feedback from an electric guitar – toneless, just squealing, thin, quiet, a trance induction. The static and volume ebb and flow, massaging your ears, sounding like something between a whale’s slow cries and a transgalactic revelation. Then we get what may be either actual chanting –slow, wordless, monklike, dirgey – or some strange instrument that has managed to perfectly capture the contours of the male baritone. The latter becomes increasingly likely as the notes start cutting frantically, drums that still seem somewhere at a distance slowly pick up the pace and intensity, and a high tone begins to pulse.

This cassette is that rare thing in the land of noise – a manifesto of understatement. Like a great horror film, it shows little, and you imagine much.