Fordell Research Unit / Erases - Split [turgid animal]

These Turgid Animal tapes really keep the 80s DIY aesthetic alive and well. Even the shoddyness of Hanson’s photocopied inlays is outdone here. The artwork looks like a tenth generation Xerox with the machine set to maximum contrast at each stage, and the original placed at a jaunty angle on the glass, all reproduced on super thin paper.

Fordell Research Unit are from Scotland, and that’s about all I can glean without taking my laptop down the stairs to leech the neighbours’ wireless. Their side is two minimal drones entitled The Dead Astronaut. The first part A Question of Re-Entry (isn’t there a label called that?) is a low, brooding and virtually changeless affair which bizarrely enough reminds me more of one of Toshiya Tsunoda’s field recordings than anything from the noise scene, it could quite easily be a study of the resonance of a metallic interior, activated by a stationary engine or low pitched sine wave: near static rumble. The far too brief second piece News From The Sun is suitably more glowing but has already ended, been rewound and ended again while I try to think of what to write about it.

The Erases side seems to pick up where the tape I wrote up yesterday left off, hang on I’ve just checked and the title supports this, yesterday’s side B being Haunted Waters, today’s is Haunted Swamp. The increase in thickness: from water to swamp, is palpable. A dense and relentless pulsating industrial drone - circulating like the whirling blades of a large extractor fan - underpins the first half, wavering in tone slightly. Beneath this crisp, buckled sheets of metal are strung out to rust, a team of construction workers crackling into action upon them with grinders and welders. The fan eventually recedes leaving a light high-pitched whine hanging in the air and allowing distortion laden arcs of feedback to take the foreground.

Of the three tapes I picked up from Turgid Animal, this one is definitely the pick.
Fordell Research Unit.

Erases – Brooding Organs/Haunted Waters [turgid animal]

It’s grim up North, and this tape, recorded in Leeds in 2007, does little to break the stereotype. Erases are Lee Stokoe (Culver, Skullflower), George Proctor (Mutant Ape and honcho at Turgid Animal) and Dean Glaister. Here they offer us two sides of bleak and blackened drone: as desolate as England’s coal mines, as unforgiving its moors. There is little progression or development, just dogged grind, crackles and screech all getting lost in the turbulence. The lack of clarity - all sounding like it was recorded from the other end of an empty hangar - is, I’m sure, intentional, though at times it seems to take the teeth out of their material, dampening the impact of the occasional blurts that puncture the enveloping storm clouds. Things close in a bit part-way through the second side, gritty shrieks and malfunctioning machinery lurching into the foreground dragging all manner of damage and feedback with them, and suddenly it really gels, the cosy voyeuristic distance of the first half is blown away and the ear scratching detail prevails. It’s a magnificently evocative journey through a windswept post-industrial wasteland of crumbling masonry and rusted girders, coming in close to Bob Bellerue’s Redglaer project.

Turgid Animal