cassette craze chronicles VII (feat. CHARLIE BUTLER, PRIMITIVE MAN, THECODONTION and VESSEL OF INIQUITY)

 

In the mood for some crystal clear dream pop? Then this bunch of recent tape arrivals in my collection is probably something you should check out later.

PRIMITIVE MAN - Caustic (2017/2020)

I've tried to get into Primitive Man before, but somehow it didn't work. Maybe it was the other album not being for me, maybe they were just too much or I was just too weak. Maybe I first had to train myself with bands like Cryptae, who knows. Whatever, bygones! I'm fully converted now and can uhm... enjoy? the Tartarus Records tape edition of their 2017 masterpiece "Caustic" with all of my senses. Or better with the little rest of senses this superlative of aural punishment hasn't pulverized yet.

Primitive Man shout directly into your ear to berate you for the downfall of Earth and humanity, which is your fucking fault, while they smash your jaw on the border stone - and they do it perseveringly and in slow motion to make sure that you don't miss one nanosecond of that sweet torturous murderous pain.
Everything about this apocalyptic meteor of sludge is set to cause complete annihilation. And seldom has the shattering of all your bones at once felt so good.

CHARLIE BUTLER - Collapsing Sphere (2021)

Appearently Primitive Man have accidentally left all their gear running after their last rehearsal. And now all that crusty crunchy distortion is droning through endless loops. Feedbacks and overtones are seperating themselves from the rumbling mass, levitating. Somehow this almost sounds beautiful now.

Of course this is not Primitive Man's instruments' random transition to independence, but the deliberate work of Charlie Butler. "Collapsing Spheres" is a rather short, but all the more enthralling collection of minimalistic drone waves. Especially the two B-side tracks "Diverted Bridleway" and "Pull Down The Drawbridge" flood the room with dark Sunn O)))shine. Fanciers immediately realize that this music is ninety percent about sound. And the sound is just right.

As a low-fi film photographer myself I also dig the cover artwork of the tape, which is shot very much in the style of a lot of my shit. So that's cool too, right?

THECODONTION / VESSEL OF INIQUITY - The Permian-Triassic Extinction Event (2021)

The Italian dinosaur kids are back! All of us who have been a little boy at some point know this phase, right? Where you love dinosaurs so much that you learn all their names and every information your little children's book provides and proudly recite all your knowledge to everyone? Yeah, got you!
Thecodontion never left that phase and have made a concept out of telling us all their Wikipedia knowledge about selected dinosaur species - over a gnarly bass-guitar-only black metal soundtrack!
This weird link between earliest Sodom and modern avant-garde black metal with the lead tone of funeral doomers Bell Witch already worked extremely well on their full-length debut "Supercontinent" and continues to do so on the two tracks on this tape, where they introduce us to "Thecodontosaurus antiquus" and "Procompsognathus triassicus".

This split EP however is dedicated to the event which killed almost all species on Earth approximately 251 million years ago. And the B-side shows us exactly how that destruction sounded with the eleven minute track "The Great Dying" by Vessel Of Iniquity. The one-man project heaps up all kinds of black metal, orchestral sounds and noises in such an exorbitant amount, that it ultimately seems to be more white noise than music. Which is exactly the point and makes this low-fi blastfest a very convincing representation of its idea.
And since we are living right in the middle of the greatest extinction event since the fall of the evolutionary much more successful and long-lasting giants, we'll rather sooner than later will have to accept that this right here is also the jam of our doom.