Monday, April 20, 2009

Dubbio Nil & Bearses reviews

A couple new reviews of recent releases on my microlabel, Hymns:

From
Auxiliary Out:


Bearses – The Prettiest Girl I Ever Saw [Hymns]
Not sure if this band’s name is pronounced like “bare-zees” or “bee-arses” but that’s beside the point. This 3incher, from Florida label Hymns, is a crumpled up mass of static spread across five tracks. There are samples of stuff buried deep down but they’re mangled beyond recognition by incredibly thick, saturated distortion and pitch shifting. Near the send of the first track a bit of carribean dance/pop stuff (maybe?) is barely audible through the muck leading into flashes of slowed radio DJ babble, heavily rhythmic crunching distortion and garbled vocal tones in the second piece. It’s nice having bands like Bearses to remind us just how much a fuck-ton of fuzz can morph one sound into something entirely different——namely magnanimously crusty squalls. The third track brings up the curtain a bit letting shards of distortion interact with the source material (a slowed down, rambling folk tune) instead of smothering it. It’s a well-placed melodic break in the middle of the record. The fourth track is interesting as well. There’s plenty of distortion but bits and pieces of gongs, bells and ethnic percussion poke through at certain intervals. The fifth track uses a lot hi-pitched freakouts amongst sloshed zombie slurs——a nice little kick in the teeth to remember them by.

For people, like me, who keep the radio dial placed equidistantly between stations or for fans of listening to records at the wrong speed played through twelve Metal Zones.

From Vital Weekly #673:

DUBBIO NIL - SEED, FRUIT, THORN (3"CDR by Hymns)
Along with this release comes a small plastic bag with a seed in it and there is a small text on the cover about grass, explaining (?) the title, and the webaddress of the band, but that website is hardly a place for extensive researching. So whatever he or she does, its about organic matter, I'd say. Producing sound with perhaps organic matter, being transformed through some sound effects, or perhaps even on a computer - its a bit hard to tell here. Its one piece that lasts about sixteen minutes and its not bad at all. It sort of reminded me of early Small Cruel Party or Yeast Culture - although: who'd be remembering that after all those years? Drone like, mysterious, vague, but also quite nice to hear. It leaves lots of room to think and interpretate things your way. Sometimes that's nice enough. A small gemm this one. (FdW)
Address: http://www.myspace.com/hymnslabel

Dubbio Nil made a lovely video for the first portion of his track: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_W_55dJ0zzE

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