Another one of the lesser-known-to-me installments in Handmade Birds' recent "Yellow Series" of limited-edition cassette tapes / art objects, JSH's Heretic comes from a Swedish harsh noise artist that has previously toured here in the States alongside Vomir, Black Leather Jesus, and The Rita as well as releasing splits with Richard Ramirez's BLJ outfit. So that might give you at least a basic idea of what to expect here, as well as some small insight into the fetishistic nature of this artist's work. It's a full-length tape with minimal, sigil-like cover art, just shy of half an hour, but delivers this distortion attack via two massive tracks that average around fifteen minutes in length. The first, "The Manifest Of Dissent", is high-order "wall noise", the avalanche of crumbling, decomposing, churning static and feedback and distortion washing over you in a violent oceanic surge. Top-shelf "HNW", as it were, but set apart from the Rita / Vomir clones with an obvious attention to space and speed and saturation, with the hypnotic crackling maelstrom streaked with these almost anguished-sounding peals of feedback, and specked with sudden, jarring edits and dropouts that make this much more assaultive and demanding than the mesmeric stream-of-crunch meditation that you get with a lot of other harsh noise wall sculptors. Regardless, fanatics of the mega-overmodulated textures found in this field will get their belly full, and then some. The power of that a-side is on par with some of my favorite examples of the genre like The Rita's Thousands of Dead Gods and Vomir's Renonce.

That cut-up elements extends to "The Great Swedish Apostate " on the flipside, and it's equally searing and suffocating. Gargantuan blasts of shifting, speaker-eating distorted crackle and crunch, again assembled with energetic shifts in tempo or aggression, this one even demonstrating some heavy-as-hell percussive power in the latter half that approaches junk-noise levels of catastrophic entropy. JSH’s Hammarstedt mixes things up with some slightly different textural sounds and a tactile physicality to the piece, showing that even within the "harsh noise wall" aesthetic, there is room for expanding thought and approach. And it's highly effective. Just like any HNW that I particularly take a shine to, the sounds of Heretic are best experienced loud and, if possible, though headphones - it's always the most effective way to fully immerse yourself in this vast and sprawling field of immolating, earth-scorching chaos.

Rich at Handmade Birds has a refined ear for harsh noise; after following his label's work from the start, I always rest assured that anything he brings us from the extreme electronic noise spectrum is going to have an identity and an approach all its own.

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