Not your typical harsh noise. Following a run of splits with Lurker, Baphomet Sex, Human Hazard and Hana Hurana, the newish noise outfit Nudeconsumer arrives with its first full-length album We Can See Merely What Comes Before Its Windows. Part of the Black Alchemy Series on Handmade Birds, this Seattle artist (also involved in Cranial Key and Gutting) blasts some caustic harsh noise wall that moves through higher frequencies, resulting in an avalanche of charred, jagged distortion, surrounding islands of strange and arcane voice recordings and grainy, ambient sound. Closer in feel and texture to the highly deliberate and obsessive static-sprawls of The Rita versus the meditative emptiness of Vomir's oceanic dead-station monotonies, but with a unbique underlying element of mystical thought.

It opens with an old recording of the gorgeous, warbling voice of renowned Appalachian folk singer Berzilla Wallin, singing the old traditional gospel tune "O Death". Her wavering, weathered voice is like the sound of a heart bursting, and drifts wraithlike across the first moments of the album. Hanging there, raw and beautiful. Striking in contrast to the murky black and white bondage photo on the cover. And then the earth is ripped apart, and everything is obliterated by gargantuan black clouds of swarming, buzzing botfly distortion. Jarring and abrupt to the point of violence. You're instantly hurled into an unrelenting storm of crackling, crumbling, crashing electronic noise, pushed so hard into the red that knobs were probably snapped off. What is the meaning of this? Each track of rumbling static grows longer and more immersive as you move through the recording, stretching out the low-end vulcanized topographies to seven, eight, eleven minutes, each piece pointing towards ideas of divinity and transcendence ("The Tears Of God", "Purification", "Illusive", "Expiration", etc.). It might be my own damaged senses, but there appear to be glimpses of something else, indefinable but human, voices and music, obscured deep in the crushing, swirling death-static. Subliminal. Flashes of liturgical choral music. And then old lecture recordings of influential writer and mystic Manly P. Hall surface, touching on spiritual and alchemical themes that continue to recur throughout the album. "Purification" is particularly arresting, as that thunderous churn disintegrates into lush (but low-fidelity) washes of church music and random room sounds for several minutes, until finally and jarringly blasting back into the hyper-modulated distortion. The contrast has a strange effect on the listener. A shift in sonic texture that, in my case, had a spatial distorting effect.

I'm curious to see if Nudeconsumer's other work similarly connects sampled sound and music with harsh wall noise. The approach on We Can See Merely... is uniquely affecting. On "Internal/Eternal", the sound shifts into a more layered blend of those Hall recordings with highly controlled bubbling contact-mic crackle and crunch and an undercurrent of ambient hiss. I love this kind of esoteric noise collage. It stands alone on the album, though, as the following tracks go back to the massive walls of blown-out distortion. It's all very well done, one of the more thoughtful ,even "conceptual" harsh "wall" noise releases I've picked up lately. Encasing metaphysical thought in a turbulent sphere of total tectonic obliteration.

Super-limited and part of Handmade Birds' Black Alchemy Series, the tape case comes in the series' signature packaging of case enclosed in a black fabric bag with metal tokens and housed in a sequentially-ordered O-card slipsleeve.