I have a couple of older Fire Island, AK releases that Thomas Boettner sent me prior to my life imploding in the second decade of the new aeon, and all of 'em are a blast. First up is this handmade cassette / DVDR box , and it looks and feels terrific. I love this kind of release, black and white xerox images pasted onto the box, a black hub on the inside cover that holds the DVD, a single simple photocopied insert. Classic American noise aesthetic. Issued in 2013 , this document holds a stack of live recordings from Boettner's project, both audio and video. More ambiguous in its horror than the acidic power electronics of Boettner's other outfit Straight Panic , this project is steeped in a bleary, grainy darkness that crosses through the hinterlands of homemade industrial, brain-damaged black metal murk, and specks of cracked and broken power electronics. Killer shit.

I pulled out the tapes first. I wanted to listen to these sets before I had any visual reference for any of 'em. Mild spray-paint on both, look just as grimy and grubby, smudged and stained as the sounds ensconced on these reels. Each side hosts a different performance recorded between 2010 and 2012 either from Spartanburg, South Carolina or Anchorage, Alaska, with around forty-five minutes of music in total. Some of these sets are a quick seven minute assault of juddering chaos, others stretch upward of eighteen minutes and drag your cortex through a primitive symphony of sputtering muddled industrial skuzz. The constant throughout these Fire Island AK recordings is the merciless abuse Boettner levels at the audience. Low-fidelity tangles of buzzsaw noise and machine parts rumbling and breaking apart. Random vocals run through a filthy blanket of distortion and yelled overtop the screaming guitar feedback and blasts of what sounds like dangerous chainsaw equipment being slung around. It's got its moments where Boettner pulls all of his rioting equipment and roaring electronics together and it starts to sound like power electronics, his stentorian ranting just audible above the din. Other sets start off more spare and atmospheric, blending sampled dialogue from horror films with staccato blasts of amplified chaos; there's an interesting back and forth that he does in the 2010 Anchorage set between fragmented sound from The Blair Witch Project and abrupt cacophonic blasts that sound like a drum kit is being hurled across the room. And then it'll revert back to that greasy, smoke-belching mechanical noise that dominates his sound, rhythmic blocks of distorted churn and shrill feedback, insane sounding vocals punching through the ruined dirgescape. Hollow, ghostlike singing is strung like filaments of ectoplasm across the support beams in a cramped basement. Séance-like passages of impossibly echoing sound lulls you into a half-awake daze. Burly distorted powerchords pulse bright in blackness, shifting a set into crude psychedelic doom-drone. Shards of prismatic melody are suspended in space while seriously zoned-out mumblings rise like low-lying marsh gas; shadows pass by, is that a piece of country music? The random audience chatter becomes part of the blur. The drift and drone always resolving itself to that clattery machinelike rumble, locked in repetition. I've mentioned it in other reviews of Boettner's work with this project, but it still pertains: these clanking, putrid industrialized sludge-splats evoke some of that Wolf Eyes-style grossness, but with a chronic spookiness, maniacal, tortured screams, and unintelligible malice that all reminds me of some lumbering black industrial creep. It's all bloody throats and diesel - stink, rotting meat stuck in the gears of some bizarre Eastern Bloc-era appliance, lurching and shambling beneath a pile of stained mattresses and piss-soaked blankets. This live Fire Island shit is gnarly.

White DVD with the title scrawled across it in marker. Eight different performances, a lot to glue your eyes and ears to. Naturally, the sound and video quality varies, but every single one of these sets, from the barely nine-minute set at that house show in Spartanburg, SC from 2010 to the thirty-plus minute crowd-assault captured at the S Lounge in Anchorage, AK from back in 2013, is a total blast. The menu allows you to select which show you want to watch, so that's a plus. If you've got the time, though, do what I did and just let this whole thing play through. Sometimes it's just Boettner hunched over a small table of devices, barely lit, while causing an amplified cymbal to whoosh in like some orchestra pit from hell, slowly unfurling an amorphous mass of choral voices, percussive rumble, looped drones and what sounds like saxophones squealing in pain - a Sisyphean symphony with shades of Gnaw Their Tongues, though more minimal in scale. Exquisite nightmare ambient. Other sets, the camera zooms all the way in to his face while he mangles some sort of mini-synth and churns out absolutely horrendous harsh noise that transforms into otherworldly birdsong and Gregorian chant. Strains of proto-industrial whine from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre soundtrack merge with bowel-shuddering bass drone before it kills the PA; the small house-show crowd share looks of concern in the dimly-lit corridors. Things slip into a strange sideways mood that is part Abruptum, part Crank Sturgeon, then the video cuts off abruptly. People stumble about. The camera focuses in on closeups of Boettner's massive suitcase of electronic equipment. Boettner manhandles people in the crowd. Long static shots of Boettner back up against a living-room wall, slowly twisting knobs to generate low-level earthquakes in the person's house while he chants through clouds of delay. People chatting about ashtrays. At one point in Anchorage, it looks like he hijacks a punk rock show and then hypnotizes the kids with a giant grinding ghost-drone, all while decked out in a sick Bathory hoodie. A bunch of pals demand an encore, and man, does he give it to them, spitting out a brutal power electronics blast that looks / sounds like it killed everything organic in a fifteen-foot radius.

Wish I could've been in these rooms, baked out of my skull, lying in repose on some ratty couch with a Pabst in my hand, just letting those waves of deathdrone and spook-loops wash over me. Would've been a blast. This'll do, though.

Released in a hand-numbered edition of fifty-one copies.