Adroitly described as “a hallucination inside brutalist concrete”, Toronto-based Steven Tait’s memorycarderror deals in drones, repetition and harsh tonalities that nod squarely in the direction of early industrial music.

On his second cassette album for Industrial Coast, the two 15-minute tracks possess a ground-out, fuzzy quality reminiscent of the early DIY 7-inch releases by Thomas Leer and Robert Rental: namely a punk spirit wrapped in warped and dirty effects. As it progresses, the single repeated bass-heavy riff of the A-side gently evolves, almost imperceptibly, but never once static. A sudden fade into silence reveals the tiniest of rhythms that may actually just be grimy intra-frequency radio pulses, before an ominous, brain-melting overdriven bass shape aggressively becomes the focus of the thrilling final five minutes.

The B-side is, if it’s even possible, harsher still. Its carefully-wrought, clashing cycles of angry distorted loops are delivered with a frantic, inescapable energy. Lying somewhere between metal, dark ambient and the sort of headcleaning noise that peppered David Lynch’s Eraserhead, it is not for the faint-hearted. Here, a sudden break in the tension locks your attention on a heavily-skewed beat that sounds as if it was developed from the wildest of malfunctioning amp feedback, slowly building back up into extremest malevolence.

semiotic staples by memorycarderror is out soon on Industrial Coast.

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2019 Further.