So many years into collecting and immersing myself in the vast RRRecords catalog, and I am still coming across noise releases that I missed for one reason or another but which shred my brain beautifully. Like the 2016 RRRecycled Music Series tape from Ames Sanglante, the harsh noise alter-ego of Quebecois artist Pierre-Marc Tremblay, that gutter-savant notorious for his legion of different, unique projects, bands, and endeavors that include Akitsa, Vilains Bonshommes, Departure Chandelier, Venusberg Cardinal, Contrepoison, Outre-Tombe, and running the Tour De Garde label. Ames Sanglantes is one of his oldest projects; with releases stretching all the way back to 1998. The project name roughly translates to "Bloody Souls", in keeping with the general macabre theme that catalyzes his musical expressions, and the sound of Ames Sanglantes has evolved a bit over the course of the project's nearly twenty-five year existence. On this Recycled tape (released in 2016, I believe), Tremblay's untitled noise excursions travel over a varied but rough topography that stretches out for a bit over half an hour, starting off with restraint but leading you into a crushing harsh noisescape by the end.

Specks of sharp, pointillist feedback emerge from a lo-fidelity haze of tape hiss, settling into a steady sinewave whine right before a sub-surface whirl of distant skree, mysterious subterranean flutter and quick bursts of bitcrushed noise starts to take over on the A-side. It is abrasive but pulled-back, allowing for the subtle interplay of Tremblay's feedback machinations with that muted and distant oceanic rumble to spread out multi-directionally. More blips of crushed glitch appear briefly, while that chthonic reverberation slides into a kind of pulsating rhythm. This hovers in a similar void-field as the monotonous, pungent industrial minimalism of Zone Nord and Davide Tozzoli's work under the N. banner. There's a strange semi-organic presence within the muffled, caustic dronescape that really becomes apparent when that tranquil static starts heaving and throbbing beneath the shrill tone-streams and it all starts to feel like you are holding a closed container of writhing grubs up to your ear. In part, meditative, but also a little bit ghastly as it all slowly takes the form of a seething chitinous mass of insectile chaos. Chattering, clattering movements bursts from the slow shifting murk, those 8-bit electronic noises bursting onto the scene like some malevolent Morse code transmission. But when it switches over to the b-side, take cover: those sounds are suddenly and monstrously amplified, erupting into a cacophonic throb with the distortion pushed into the deep red, frying out the signals and bathing everything in a massive level of crunch. All of the mid-range is scooped out, leaving a bass-heavy mass of over-modulated rumble and hiss. All quite cathartic, of course, and heavy on detail as is the norm with Âmes Sanglantes recordings. Tremblay was obviously taking inspiration from some of the U.S. titans of extreme psychedelic primitivist noise a la Macronympha and Richard Ramirez circa-Nature's Afterbirth / Bleeding Headwound.

As with all of RRRecords' Recycled Music Series, this material is recorded over a pop/rock cassette, with hand-scrawled titles on the duct-taped cassette and cover.