Review - Uneven Universe: Nebula Blanket

I saw this band a couple weeks back with Trash Dog in Iowa City, and picked up this double tape. First off, lemme just say . . . a double tape is a lot of music. These are 47 minutes each, so it’s more than a CD would hold if you filled it up completely. Thinking about it one way, that’s a lot of sound for your money. On the other hand, what’s the first thing you’d think about an 80 minute CD?



Luckily, this is quality stuff. Uneven Universe use a saxophone duo setup to make some amazing, really haunting sounds, and the highlight is definitely when some sense of melody and change starts to emerge from the otherwise somewhat uniform wash of (perfectly nice) static. About halfway through the first side of the green tape they get busy with the sax, producing long, slow tones that build an immense sense of loneliness and weirdness. It’s the sound of whales after the apocalypse, swimming through the submerged ruins of New York, talking about sunsets.

Following is a segment of pulsing bass contrasted with the sounds of a lightly-touched, echoing stringed instrument. I’m loving the sense of space and difference here – “noise” doesn’t always have to be unrelenting walls. Not that Uneven Universe skimps on that, either – the top of Green Side B is super intense buzzsaw square tones, twisted and turned into an echo that’s ear-piercing. Even the saxophone gets harsh here, open-throated squawking that shows just how flexible good old analog is.

Then there’s a real piece de resistance – a really nice duet for . . . well, I can’t quite tell. A mix of saxophone and theremin? A tone generator? As we progress further in, there’s an organ in the mix, moaning, sloooooooooow and creepy. A real conversation – lots of empty space and skilled improvisation. It’s intense, again in a subterranean, poetic way. This is eminently weird shit – it really needs to be used as the soundtrack to a Lovecraft film.

I will say this section goes on a bit too long – one of the few moments “Nebula Blanket” might have benefited from some self-editing. Otherwise things move very nicely – and re: my earlier comment about the double cassette I guess there’s an important qualification – that ‘noise’ listening just isn’t like listening to other kinds of music. In one sense, it’s more passive – you just sit back and let the sounds wash over you. Of course in other ways it’s more active, since imagination is so necessary – what you bring to it yourself almost makes the experience. But it’s this passive aspect that makes really long releases more logical – it’s not like you’re going to get tired.

With that in mind, I’ll leave the second tape to your judgment entire – or non-judgment, as the case may very likely be. This is thrombosis jonesing, slow and deep, gently unnerving. Pick it up if you’re just sick in the head enough to think you like art.

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.