Alien 8
Recorded “in person and in real time” by the protagonists in a Portland studio in 2008, Unleash (nomen omen) is the first of two collaborations between Menche and Karkowski, here exclusively credited with “live electronics”. If you had pictured a sort of mega-rumble clash of noise gods, the Ali vs. Foreman of royal harshness, the outcome should be adequately gratifying for your (possibly damaged) ears to place this album among the most interesting releases of both artists, at least as far as intensity and viciousness are concerned.
The six consecutive movements leave no doubt indeed: apart from Menche’s pseudo tribal drumming appearing every once in a while and soon engulfed by a mass of rapacious stridencies, the overall feel is one of pretty conscientious craft in the assemblage of growingly harsh manifestations of barely controlled power. Surges and discharges are unequivocally unremitting, the hurtful quality of the distortion a veritable threat for ill-equipped cerebra, the systematic onslaught of medium-to-high frequencies absolutely relentless except for the last couple of minutes, as the piece reaches its natural demise.
At the end of this nuclear confrontation my head is literally buzzing, the mind asking if we’re still young and fresh enough to keep enduring this kind of aural cure. The delirious scribbler is renewing his subscription for another season in the belief that he’ll be healed, definitively delivered from the bags of idiocy that human words continuously try to dump in all those unfilled skulls.
