Emaciator - Secondary [rare youth]

Another week, another Emaciator tape. I just never tire of hearing this guy’s work. This one appears on Geoff Mullen’s Rare Youth imprint and was recorded “in daylight” we are told. As you would expect from Borges (circa april 2008) both sides have a warm and cosy core, but neither maintains the happy healing vibes of, say, Treetops stuff, opting instead for the path of desolate surge and gradual accretion. Smooth sines are tempered with buzzing saws penduluming about one another, threatening to clash but always dipping and swinging alongside back into lulling balance.

Borges just lets seems to take his hands off the reins, letting his tones roll down a few circuit-alleys to see what grime they pick up on the way, which sounds as if I’m not crediting him with any compositional control or musicianship – not the case. The music here just seems to grow and shift of its own accord, rather than being pushed, pulled, tweaked and tinkered. There’s not an ounce of over-worked, brow-sweated material, everything’s kept simple and it all just glides, a real pleasure to listen to - it’s been around and around in the deck for the last week and I could happily go on playing it for another.

Rare Youth

Emaciator - Appease [hanson]

There’s no information on the emaciated-children-adorned inlay to tell us when this was recorded but judging by the trajectory that Jon Borges’ Emaciator project has been on (as discussed in my previous Emaciator post) I would say the music on here is a fair bit older than other recent releases: this might be the harshest episode yet in my personal encounters with the project. The whole of the first side is pinned solidly to the ground with a ton of low frequency quake, seeming to set off a tumbling cascade of rubble in the right speaker, while electro-shock therapy is intermittently administered to a robot in the left channel. I’m not sure if it’s my aging dusty hifi kit making it sound like this, but with the exception of the smothering mattress of bass, there’s some pretty hard panning of the other sounds: shrieks to the left, crumblings to the right; which I’m really liking. Great to hear this excellent rough-edged side of Borges’ drone work, amid his increasingly ‘pleasant’ ouput. The other side is a considerably less engrossing mid-range grind, a continual pulsating whirl of helicopter blades chopping through sheets of sandpaper which persists in wall-like fashion throughout. Unrelentless but fairly uninteresting, which is a shame as for me it kind of lets the tape down a bit.

Available from Hanson

Emaciator - Appease [monorail trespassing]

The longer Jon Borges works under his Emaciator guise, the softer his recordings seem to get. Having sucked me in with Resentment, the CD he recorded for Alex Cobb’s Students of Decay label, he blew me away with last years Reflection, put out by William Hutson’s Accidie imprint. Both of those previous full-lengths fit neatly in harsh(ish)/drone territory, but in recent months the harsh edge of Borges’ output seems to have subsided. Coveting an LP from late last year on Not Not Fun was already demonstrating a preference for a smoother wave-shape and if there was any doubt as to the general direction then along came the release of a new album, titled Austere, by Borges’ flagship harsh noise project Pedestrian Deposit (also on monorail) which, while being richer in detail than most of the Emaciator material, also exhibits this shift towards “bliss / meditation / therapy “ (as Borges himself puts it). I imagine die-hard fans of the early Pedestrian Deposit material must be finding this progression a bitter pill. Even myself, having placed the Reflection 2LP squarely inside last year’s top ten was slightly disappointed to find the square-tooth edge of the Emaciator sound gradually filing itself back to tonality. With his general trajectory in mind, this 22 minute tape continues just as you would expect it to. Certainly the most tonal material I’ve heard yet from Emaciator. Two sides of sky-gazing drift, “to reach a state of peace”.

Considering the wealth of quality and not-so-quality drone musicians shimmering and glistening about in the underground at present it’s pretty hard to make your presence felt, but whether the thought of Borges’ permanently joining these ranks brings a smile or a frown, he’s clearly damn good at it. A strong tape, though if I had to recommend just one of this latest batch of monorails it would be his new Pedestrian Deposit album.

monorail trespassing