That’s right fuckers, this Molting joint is ready to go. Apart from me and Moe’s personal copies and a couple review copies I’ll be sending off soon, there are only 10 for sale ever. 30 minutes of mind-melting harsh noise that changes every few seconds like someone flipping channels on an old TV up full blast and yet somehow manages to be fun and have an abstract sense of humor to it. May cause your eyeballs to vibrate uncontrollably. $4 ppd to centipedefarmer at gmail dot com. Check out the catalog page, since you’re thinking about it.

So I get that this is the kind of stuff that is being called “HNW” (for “harsh noise wall”) online these days. Glad to have a term for it now. Molting caught my interest with a series of YouTube videos of various noise pieces with lengthy, gory titles. Especially memorable was one that was something to the effect of “amplified sounds of slugs dying from having salt poured on them” or something like that. What was great was, the track actually sounded like what I would imagine that sound to be. Anyway Eric of Marax apparently was also intrigued by what Moe was doing, which incidentally fits quite nicely alongside the harsher end of Marax‘s work, and following a split 3″, issued this Molting full-length CD-R on his Muchausen Sound label. As always, the track titles make interesting reading, but equally interesting is the range of textures within the general neighborhood of “blasting harsh distortion” that Molting explores here. This is dark, ugly harsh noise, built on overloaded circuits, feedback, and effects manipulations through a DIY methodology, in the classic vein of The Earwigs, Raised In Meat, Sonic Disorder, etc., but especially inhuman and brutal, influenced by the aesthetic of grindcore and gore. “Disheveled Planet” as an album has a unifying concept, with most tracks (except for perhaps the relatively whimsical “Makeshift Transistor CB Radio”) aiming at a sonic depiction of their titular images of  man-made environmental destruction. “Industrial Waste Devastation Of An Amphibial Habitat” might trick you into thinking it’s a hissy cassette recording but the tape-hiss-like sound turns out to be an integral instrument of the piece, underlying the feedback and distorted low destructive percussion sounds and the strangled vocal moans expressing the pain of the sickened and dying animals. “Human Waste Clogging The Bowels Of The Sewer” alternates a sludgy low-pitched noise with a higher one, with reverb that sounds like the inside of a sewer culvert, and finally a white-noise waterfall pouring from the drain into a stinking, polluted river. “Sounds Of The Apocalypic Void” leaves us off in a less assaultive mode, a deep, ominous ambient sound that cuts off abruptly. [get here]

Checking out the bandcamp stream of this new Marax joint on a Minneapolis noise label called Darker Days Ahead while checking out DDA’s website. Thinking maybe I’d like to work with this outfit when it comes time to release Explortation, the noise album I’m working on, if they’d have me. In any case I want to check out their zine and that compilation so I’m sure I could drop them a CD-R in the mail and see what thy think at least. Anyway this is yet another fine release from Marax, another feather in Mr. Crowe’s cap. Listen below:

Meanwhile, I recently looked through some of the songs I had mixed down on my computer and realized I had an album brewing there. There was this group of tracks that just fit together, not a noise album, apart from one track, but still a pretty interesting set of songs and instrumentals, and it would fit pretty nice on 45 minute cassette. So I’m hereby announcing the impending release of a new Distant Trains album called Teen Lust both online and on cassette in an edition of 25 (and maybe another 25 to follow if those run out and there’s demand), once I manage to come up with some cover art. A major drawback of my having always been so focused in music and other things is that I’ve never developed any real skill in visual arts. I’m thinking of seeing if Ira wants to try coming up with something…

Anyway on to more stuff about Marax, and also his partner in yet another split 3″ CD-R, Molting. I think the ongoing series of split 3″ CD-R releases is a pretty cool networking tactic on the part of Marax besides its yielding some pretty cool sounds. I’m certainly honored to be among those to have made one with him (I still have some copies, check the link to the right). This is a particularly good matchup as their sounds have a bit in common. This is 18 very harsh ear-torture minutes. Two tracks from the more frenetic side of the Marax spectrum. Molting, a bit newer on the scene perhaps, is a fellow who calls himself “Moe Lesther” and claims to make harsh noise influenced by goregrind. That doesn’t, evidently, translate to gorenoise, but rather something much more abstract in Molting’s case. The first half of his piece sounds like a demonically possessed Atari 2600 speaking blasphemies in a language made up of explosion sound effects; after that maybe an overdriven mix of some immense heavy machinery through analog TV static. I’ve become pretty interested in Molting’s approach, he has a number of tracks up on a YouTube channel and Facebook page and quite a few releases out in a short time.

I also lucked into Marax’s 2008 release on Crucial Blast, Black Veil of the Sanguinarian. It’s a more subdued, slow-burn kind of death-drone, which is welcome after the assault of the above split. At “Returning to Rust” it’s evening in the countryside of singing metallic insects. “Inside the Inner Voice” uses very slowed-down spoken word, which someone somewhere mentioned in reference to last year’s Funeral Liturgy as a bit of a Marax trademark, but this is the first other place I’ve heard it. “Bleeding Black” has a great rumbling-crumbling sub-bass drone with what might be progressively higher-pitched and more-distorted versions of itself layered over. Seven minutes in I think I hear a distant voice in it but then it’s gone. Later it seems to resolve into a couple of chords, but only for a second before the piece ends. We find those chords again a little ways into “NOD”, a 22-minute sound trip that transitions nicely from a noise drone intro to a mesmerizing horror movie synth line that forms the basis for the rest of the track.