The Answer Is In The Beat

Henry & Hazel Slaughter: Endless Power Cycle LP (Fedora Corpse, 2013)

August 9, 2013 at 9:21 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

Fedora Corpse presents the first non-American Tapes release by Henry & Hazel Slaughter, a new solo venture of John Olson from Wolf Eyes. This is supposedly his “demented techno project”, according to a little note sent with this promo, but it’s not even close to the sort of actually danceable techno that Moon Pool & Dead Band do. This is seriously corroded, staggering, stuttering, short-circuiting dead-drunk electronic music, with swarming synth-scapes, noise bursts, backwards beats, and oblong rhythms. In Wolf Eyes terms, it emphasizes the shuddering, thudding drum machine rhythms, does away with vocals and guitar thrashing, and mostly frames the noise onto distorting the jagged, skipping machine rhythms. If you want to try to frame this in a dance music context, this might be like going to some illegal dance party, drinking something far more spiked than you expected, and when you sit down you feel like you’re in an electric chair, while the DJ keeps trainwrecking and all his records are skipping. At one point (A5) it sounds like the DJ’s just cueing up records, as the rhythm keeps fading out and coming back in like it’s just a bunch of preview clips. On side B some dub spectres come to haunt the place, turning the place into some sort of haunted electrified dancehall. But even these ghosts seem more concerned with flying and crashing around and breaking stuff and causing physical damage than actually having a dance party. Totally fun stuff. Of course, the record is pressed to highlighter yellow see-through vinyl, so it’s hard to tell which track is which, and there’s no track titles anyway, so it’s not the easiest record to DJ with, but that’s not the point. Also, side A ends in a locked groove, but the track itself has such a pattering, skipping rhythm that it sounds like a locked groove already, except you’re wondering why you can hear subtle differences in the electronic droning in the background, so that when it actually does reach the locked groove, you don’t even notice it’s just repeating and not actually evolving, but you still feel like you hear different sounds coming in and out of the mix somehow.