One of two tapes from The Rita in Handmade Birds' Yellow - Critical Fabric Series, Nancy Weston (The Rack Sessions) is a lengthy two-track album that appears to feature material created tangentially to the artist's album The Rack, released by HB around a decade ago. It's another fetishistic expression from Sam McKinlay's harsh noise machine, but this time pursues the image and presence of the little-known actress Amy Farrell, specifically her role and performance in Herschell Gordon Lewis's sleazy proto-splatter camp-cult 1972 shclock horror classic The Gore Gore Girls. In the film, Farrell plays tabloid reporter "Nancy Weston", who finds herself immersed in a plot filled with sordid murders, strippers, and incredible levels of bad taste. It's a riot, if you're the sort of depraved ape that has a taste for H.G. Lewis's scum-cinema and tongue-in-cheek gore-gags (emphasis on the gag). Here, The Rita focuses on the titular actress on the first track, and then following that with another slab of black static titled after Weston's character "Amy Farrell" from Gore Gore Girls - real vintage splat worship. Old-school horror movie fanatics might have fond memories of the notorious big box tape of The Gore Gore Girls on Midnight Video that towered on video store shelves back in the 1980s; this was actually the last of Lewis's films until he resurfaced with new work in the early 2000s, spurred on by a new generation of fans discovering his pioneering exploitation cinema via DVD reissues on Something Weird Video (it's astoundingly still banned in Australia, for some bizarre reason).

Anyways, yeah, this is an act of concentrated fetishism from The Rita, though the details of this are left ambiguous beyond the reference to Weston. Are those her legs and feet on the slipcase for the first edition? Unknown. But the overall visual presentation is tethered to that of the original The Rack album. The two tracks are a blackout of atomizing electronic / mic annihilation. "Nancy Weston (The Rack)" is the first half, quick emissions of amplified cable/mic crackle, loud (if you're listening to this at the right volume, which should ideally be cranked all the fucking way to eleven) and chaotic, the bursts of buzz and sizzle coming in fast, intermittent jolts, brilliantly blown-the-fuck-out, almost resembling the sound of a human voice that has been overmodulated to the furthest possible extremes. "Westion"'s noise feels like code, like an alien language, like scrambled and incomprehensible transmissions from a future hell-world. As is the case with The Rita, this noisescape becomes hypnotic, drawing you in to its choppy, charred, sputtering cadence. Compared to other recordings from the project, this leans towards a more "minimalist" approach; of course, any civilians that happen to pass by while this is blasting out of your speakers will immediately think that your audio equipment is hopelessly damaged. But to the elite ear, to hardcore "harsh noise wall" fanatics, this long flow of stuttering electronic skuzz is real manna.

Of course, I'm also hopelessly obsessed with Sam McKinlay and The Rita and all of his other various endeavors, in any media. So my critical ear is pretty much turned off at the moment. Just so you know.

But you wouldn't even be here if you weren't at least starting to be drawn in to the field of "HNW", and if you're a fellow Rita devotee, you know that this entity is anything but inconsistent. This has all of the incredibly tactile, "crunchy" texture that McKinlay obsessively crafts, using a bare minimum of sound input. It's fascinating to me.

Anyways, the following track "Amy Farrell (The Rack)" is likewise around roughly twenty minutes in length, and flows right out of the same aktion as the A-side. Crushed, crackling, quasi-linguistic sputter and crackle, all moving in a steady, incessant stream of ultra-0distorted sound. In fact, the further I get into this b-side, the more it feels like a human voice, the cadence and patterns, pauses and spurts exuding an uncanny and very specific pareidolia beneath the crunch. Almost like listening in to a rotary phone call from another country, another dimension, a case report relayed from such an impossible distance that the sound is seared and scorched beyond any possibility of comprehension. I like the lack of any details given with this release, though. I like the effect that this particular noise experience has on my thought process. You may experience something similar.

Along with the other ephemera that comes with these "Yellow Fabric Series" cassettes, the tape also includes two small photographs of Weston tucked into the case.