Early 2023 tape release from the mighty Phage, pairing two interesting newer dark-sound sculptors for well over half an hour of deep creep.

Scald Hymn brings two untitled tracks that are almost the exact same length; long warbling tones from chamber strings, perhaps sourced from the slow, improvised scrape and bow of a cello or viola, are delicately layered together to form a crepuscular blur of mournful-sounding drones and forlorn intonations. It's quite pretty, in a melancholic way, but as Scald (aka Erik Brown) proceeds into this dimly-lit subterreanean space, he begins to summon eruptions of garbled, metallic junk-noise, crashing metal against metal, electronics on electronics, as extreme high-frquency feedback tones scream out of the blackness like airbursts, as those stringed instruments continue to weep in anguish. In total, this side delivers a pretty powerful sonic experience, contrasting a sad sort of concrete noise poetry with blasts of absolutely excoriating, brutal cacophony. Solid stuff, with the intimate sound of fingers fumbling against knobs and dials, the sounds drifting through your brusied skull from some unmapped region between the scattershot junk/metal-blast collage of K2 or Hal Hutchinson, the hyperviolent carnage of Macronympha, and the febrile strands of intense feedback apllication pursued by Tourette.

The three pieces from counterpart Permanent Waves share a common lust for extreme feedback manipulation, as "Belief In History", "Three Mirrors For Healing And Travel", and "Shear Force Impression Model" unwind like besotted nightmares, sending streams of searing hiss and squeal over deeply warped singing and complete fucked-up pop-style vocals , the combination of all of this smearing and clotting together into an intricate abomination. Like Scald Hymn, this is a very personalized approach to harsh noise, forging a uniquely broken world of sound that grows more hideous and abrasive with each passing moment. The bits of musicality, random urban noise and natural sounds that appear become buried and crushed under the bludgeoning low-end, nerve-shredding skree, and bouts of abstracted electronic vomitus feel more and more like a mockery, until the humanity is scraped away and you are left sitting in the center of a storm of spastic, gurgling distortion and rudimentary rhythms. Somehow over the course of the twenty-minutes, this moves uneasily through haunting soundscapes and absolutely obliterating pandemonium.