Redglaer - buried with freedom
3" cdr
available
mp3
(Redglaer is Bob Bellerue aka Halfnormal. He is a noise artist, theater designer, audio engineer, performer and writer from Los Angeles. Buried With Freedom is a one track cdr full of screeching sounds, lo-fi microphone destruction and screaming noises. Special paper packaging.)
Review on Heathen Harvest: Arriving wrapped in a double sided poster this three inch CD release looks harmless enough. This charade of innocence lasts about five seconds before realisation dawns... Innocent? Harmless? Redglaer wants to damage you, your audio equipment and your relationship with the neighbours. Yup, looks like we’re back in good old noise territory. At only twenty one minutes long Buried With Freedom is a relatively short beast, but the whole twenty on minutes is chock full of interesting variations on the theme of sonic destruction and sound manipulation. There are thin scraping elements, the metal on metal sounds providing the same sensation as nails on a chalkboard, setting your teeth on edge in a wonderfully excruciating fashion. There are fat layers of mangled mid range, vocals sounds and analogue throbs chopped into each other as they stutter and slur like incoherent alcoholics, and of course there is a wealth of low frequency bass.
The bass here is a beast of many coats, from low end frequencies that attempt to pin loose clothing to you through to jerky cut ups that threaten the integrity of your speakers, and of course the low throb of the sub bass that lurks in the background, waiting for it’s moment to lunge at you. Heavy analogue effects abound, gathering the whole mass up and warping it out of shape, creating sirens and swirls of noise from the clatter or causing the whole affair to glitch and stutter as it cycles through random frequencies. There are also brief moments where it is almost silent, but these are few and far between and are, of course, only the calm before the eventual storm.
While not the harshest or most abrasive noise I’ve heard, this is far from being a damp squib. Rather than a complete and overwhelming wall of chaos that I’m more familiar with, Redglaer has kept the elements involved in the construction of this piece to a minimum and used them to weave a heavily textured and varied piece of seemingly unstructured noise, which is just what the doctor ordered. Over all this is an interesting piece of work that despite its relatively short run time never fails to deliver the goods and is thought provoking and varied throughout.