The letter "M" in the exquisite new Handmade Birds "Critical Fabric - Yellow Series" of hand-assembled cassette tapes comes to us from the obscure Denton, Texas electronics project, which is one of the biggest surprises and discoveries I made while diving into this wild series. The sounds that Haultaine craft are not easy to pin down, though it feels like the title to their 2023 CD Powerless Electronics may be a key towards unlocking the energies behind these sounds. The project has been slowly releasing work in a somewhat understated fashion going back to 2016, but this two-track album is the both the most visible (relatively speaking, of course) and emblematic of their work to date. Just looking at the tape and track titles for each side of this cassette suggest a specific spectrum of ideas: the A-side "Vast Active Unlearning Intelligence System (Erathication) " directly refers to the work of Philip K. Dick, while the title itself evokes elements of arcane geo-physics. And the b-side "B61-13 (Monstrosities Beget Monstrosities)" carries as much apocalyptic weight as anything from a "war metal" band, with its name check of the thermonuclear gravity bomb in use as part of the U.S. nuclear warhead arsenal. These inferences of ultra-destructive warfare, national aggression and the military-industrial complex, esoteric science and even Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials weave together a unique and uniquely unsettling vision on the part of Princess Haultaine III, which coupled with the hyper-mutation collage art that Kenji Siratori produce for the tape cover, subjects you to a seriously nightmarish vision and voice that reaches a fever pitch with this strange album.

It's a nerve-wracking racket. The first track combines multiple sound sources into a flowing cacophony: junk-noise and percussive metallic clatter are interspersed with blasts of overdriven distorted buzz, hum, and roar, with what sounds like an actual drum-kit being used to unleash a parade of free-form percussive attacks. The electronics are pushed all the way into the red, producing a mass of squiggling swirling skree, blown-out glitch, thunderous droning tones, and delicate threads of high-end feedback and sine wave manipulation. The music on "Vast Active Unlearning Intelligence System (Erathication) " ebbs and flows, drawing you through an unraveling system of harsh electronic skree, passages of almost AMM-esque drum work, hyper-gnarly waveform fuckery, and an array of changing sounds that at some points resemble a muffled treated piano, or a series of chimes, or alien bird-chirps arranged into binary transmission. The free-improv element on this is really strong, and is one of Princess Haultaine III's distinguishing features here; that dissonant, at times brutally violent piano assault and the continuous bursts of intense, expressive drumming create a really interesting contrast with the stream of squealing noise and pedal-assault. It's harsh as hell, though, that's for sure, evoking the disassembly of the human psyche in the face of some unknowable destructive force. Though, there are these moments, like around the 24:00 mark in "Vast”, that it peels back to unveil a very weird, and very haunting kind of ambient atmosphere. The other side "B61-13 (Monstrosities Beget Monstrosities)" is more subtle, laying a scathing spoken sample from antiwat activist Vincent Emanuele regarding the subjects of homophobic and misogynistic violence within military organizations, and the horrors of mass-scale bombing, underscored by minimalist rumbling drone. The subject matter itself is disconcerting in its matter-of-factness, but then it gives over to a new improv-noise assault that is even more explosive and violent than the previous side, with a much more vicious "cut-up" approach that feels like the abrupt and unexpected blast of an IED.

At times, I'll be remdinded of stuff like Tourette's Jardin du sommeil. Chant d'amour sur la nuit grandissante. But then a drum kit and bucket of scrap metal is hurled straight into my face at four hundred miles per hour, and it turns into something else. At nearly an hour, this is an extensive experience. And it's a really intriguing exploration of what one can do with harsh electronics and other disciplines in the use of conveying some pretty bleak, outre ideas and war-machine critique. In any event, I can't wait to hear what Princess Haultaine III brings next.

The tape comes in a standard plastic tape case with j-card (featuring artwork by Kenji Siratori), but is then housed in a hand-assembled printed slipcase, a custom tag, and a roll of yellow art paper. As with all of the other "Yellow Series" cassettes, the slipcase is lettered (this one as "M"), so that if you collect the entire series, they all line up together on a shelf to spell out "Handmde Birds". Very cool.