Out of the entire "Yellow Series" of recent Handmade Birds tapes, the pair of Military Position cassettes appear to have been the most anticipated, or at least the most sought-after. I had people ordering these two tapes before they were even on the shelf here at C-Blast. And I get it - the work of Australian death industrial / power electronics artist Harriet K Morgan under the Military Position banner isgenerally pretty hard to come by in physical format, with past titles being issued in extremely tiny runs on small, obscure labels; god help anyone outside of Melbourne that wanted to get their hands on her recordings before now. And both Nothing Lasts Forever and Prisoner are terrific pieces of black art, each one delivering a filthy jolt of burnt-out electronics, humid and harrowing atmosphere, and deeply uncomfortable confessionals of pain, debasement, and abuse that stand out against the current backdrop of contemporary death industrial. I was hooked when I finally heard the Black Noise release from Military Position prior to getting these, and each recording since then has roped me in deeper to Morgan's id. And it's frightening in here...

Nothing was initially available as a digital release from German electronics label Aufnahme + Wiedergabe, and the tape release features the exact same six-song track list. The album is partially dedicated to Sallie-Anne Huckstepp, a Sydney author, activist, and sex worker murdered in 1986 - that connection to the composition and creation of these bursts of nightmare electronics alone should lead you into a very dark and disturbing rabbithole that touches on themes of abuse, guilt, remorse, and abjection. Morgan's delivery is suitably intense, opening with the sound-collage of "I Can Enter Your Heart" that blends unsettling dialogue with an almost technoid bass-throb and gritty, grainy electronic noise; heavy Genocide Organ vibes on this right from the start, but with a very different mood and tone that sets Harriet's carcinogenic industrial pulse apart from whatever older artists and/or bands that might have influenced her. The throbbing,murky bass rhythm is relentless and hypnotic, a locked-in scum-groove pounding away incessantly under the increasing layers of metallic clang, piercing feedback, and discordant drones. The album pursues her disturbing spoken-word with brief bursts of chaotic skree ("I See You") and the intense seethe of "Gaslit", where her voice mingles with looped voice samples (from true crime media), guttural bass tones, and crackling, filthy distortion, producing one of Nothing's most demonic and apoplectic electronic death-dirges. It's ferociously angry. The material on this tape builds that indignation, her lyrics / prose hitting like a sledgehammer as she directly addresses on the blatant hypocrisies of Australian law enforecement surrounding the Huckstepp case; the last three tracks ("You Don't Define Me", "Nothing Lasts Forever", "I Have Sinned") boil over with hypnotic sequencer thud and cruel drone formations as the sounds and words plummet into the violent nightmare of the subject matter. It's subversively catchy, in spite of the horrid realities of the concept.

There's an almostn reverential-sounding seriosuness to Morgan's voice as she recites her words over these works - one of the hardest moments is the title track, where her monotone voice drifts over a distorted synthesier melody that turns the track into something almost akin to entirely electronic, blown-out doom. It's as if the album gradually coalesaces from the amorpohous skree and distortion of the first half into much more structured and melodic forms in the latter, and I found this growth riveting. Easy touchstones include both latter-day Prurient and the pernicious throb of artists like Con-Dom and the aforementioned Genocide Organ, but the quietly fuming tone of all of this, with her words spilling out sloely through clenched teeth amd suppressed rage, produce an powerful and gripping experience of its own.

As with the other tapes in the "Yellow Series", this tape comes in a standard j-card and case (signed by Handmade Birds on the interior) that is further housed inside of a large printed O-sleeve with a sticker, yellow cloth and a roll of yellow paper, a threaded tag, and a clothing tag.