The latest offering from noisemaker Alan Bloor takes an interesting premise – that an instrument forged from found stainless steel can shatter eardrums as readily as amp-fueled hardcore – beyond its logical conclusions.
So, alongside the highly distorted but still percussive claptrap of metal-on-metal, we get the buzz and wail of aching speakers and the endless reverberations of a scrap yard being hauled three-quarters of the way to hell.
This is a vicious, relentless record.
On “Exteroceptor,” the pounding transcends into a seven-minute cacophony of white noise and battlefield chaos.
On the album-closing “Panasomiasis,” the machinery almost sounds like it’s shrieking in agony.
It’s a fascinating, experimental exercise – industrial-metal in the truest senses of the word – but a lack of variation keeps this 46-minute disc from sounding genuinely inspired.
It’s on tracks where listeners sometimes can isolate the shifting spaces between Bloor’s metallic tools and the environmental noise they breed (as on “Perparaphy,” a horror-film score just waiting for a murder sequence) that the premise works best. – Punk Planet, Marc/April 2007
