Drowner / Sterile Garden

Split CD-R (Basement Tapes/What We Do Is Secret, 2010)

For: John Weise, Christian Meth, Supersilent

Byline: ...WHAT?!

So today is Friday, and I guess I just needed my ear drums blasted out. You ever get that way? You come into work, your boss is hammering you for just about anything he can/wants to, you're exhausted, you have a shitty lunch waiting for you in the freezer, the phone is ringing off the hook and you just want to get out? Of the office? Of your life? Scream, shout, run your nails on a chalkboard, make everyone around you just shut the cuss up? I need something to drown out the ambient stupidness of office life. Ah, here we go. Meet Drowner and Sterile Garden—a friendly pair of ear-splitters by way of Seattle, WA and Ft. Collins, CO (respectively) who are helping me out today with my little problem. This disc is full of high-pitched squeals, terrifying feedback, windy wooshes, creepy wooden knocks and enough unsettling static to fill a department store-full of broken TV sets. Drowner is admittedly the louder of the two, unabashed, unapologetic, and unbelievably deafening. This side feels more industrial with hissing pipes, yards of tape, flickers of coded messages in atmospheric frequencies, and dank, wallowing pit-of-dispair sewer-like settings. This music, with its pulsing, beating, throbbing volume gives you the urge to grab your hair in anguish: Yes. You are going insane right now. Sterile Garden represents the stormier, moodier, creepier set of compositions. Three tracks that remind me of Blair Witch Project for some reason (or maybe some other budget horror movie...) - dark, cold, lonely, a sound filtered through old scratchy film, and Sterile Garden also captures a suspenseful tension that will make your spine simply crawl. That deep yellow-brown color of the paper the artwork was printed on paints an appropriately hollow landscape for the sounds—old, sepia-tone, and haunted with ghostly apparitions. Oddly enough, with all this horrific (TERrific) noise, the result of playing this one through is somehow sheer silence. Nothing else is there because nothing else can fit in my head. Sorry boss, I'm busy not hearing you right now. Leave a message.

—Craw'z 6/18/2010

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