THING

With this seventh edition, attenuation circuit continues its series of four-way split albums called THING. The aim is to provide a medium for exchange and presentation of a great variety of artists. As each artist spreads the copies to their network, listeners also get to know the other artists featured on the same disc. The title references the fact that the CDs are physical objects – things! – but also refers to the 'thing' or 'ding' in old Norse and other Germanic languages, which designates the place of a popular assembly or the assembly itself and thus alludes to the 'meeting-place' character of the albums on (or around) which the four artists and their audiences meet, if only virtually.

This THING is a noise album. Its four 15-minute tracks clearly share a commitment to harshness. But they also make audible the variety of approaches and results that are possible within the spectrum referred to as noise, from confrontational glitching to immersive stasis.
Gerald Fiebig's “The Last Street Song” takes its cue from Walter Benjamin as read through Bruce Russell's essay “Exploding the atmosphere: realizing the revolutionary potential of 'the last street song'”, in which the New Zealand noise-maker and theorist argues that today, “the soundtrack to resistance might […] be Kevin Drumm or Lasse Marhaug rather than the Internationale” (or John Cale, Fiebig seems to add, whose quasi-noise song “Sabotage” is referenced at one point.)
NHWRF built the track “Moist Like DP – Dead Blood” on two fundamental samples. The title reflects the double nature of this structure. Indeed the title is 'double', and both the titles are legitimate and equal. "Moist Like DP" starts from the sample "Deep Pond" and reflects something wet. "Dead Blood" starts from the sample with the same name. The combination of the two reflects a sort of 'passage', a liminal zone, where wet and 'impure' things are at the same time dangerous and full of power.
The title of “Wir sind die Erinnerung” by Gehirn. Implosion translates as 'We are memory'. One aspect of this is memory in the sense of storage media, because the piece was created by running three already existing demo recordings (recorded memories) simultaneously and re-recording them without any further interference. So whatever subjective experience may be encoded, remembered in the demo recordings, is given over to a process that transcends and perhaps obliterates them. Because while we are shaped by the memory of our experiences, we are also yearning not to be completely determined by them.
The title of Carsten Vollmer's feedback noise suite “Respect Thee Runes” is primarily a tongue-in-cheek reference to the Nordic title of the THING series. But read the title out loud and move the excess “e” of “thee” slightly, and what you get is “Respect the ruins”. And isn't that the most respectable task of noise practice, this entropic endeavour par excellence: making audible the eventual ruin that waits at the end, or heart, of anything, no matter what the pompous 'runes' of ideology may claim to the contrary?

File under: harsh noise