Not Breathing- Carrion Sounds

Artist: Not Breathing
CD Title: Carrion Sounds
Label: Kimosciotic Records
Reviewer: Matthew Johnson
Date: 5/10/04

After departing from Invisible Records, Not Breathing’s Dave Wright is back with a new label and a new CD. Neither as conceptual as his Starry Wisdom double album nor as meandering as his collaborations with Dead Voices On Air, Carrion Sounds is simply a collection of the kind of songs Dave does best: weird electronics with an evil sense of humor and lots of strange noises. Think of him as Arizona’s answer to Coil, with Lovecraftian horror and geek culture standing in for the ritualized homosexuality. Moving in more of a drum ‘n’ bass direction than the ambient dub sounds of a lot of his previous work, Wright gives us heavily processed beats and beeps on “Worlock Radar” and early arcade game references on “National Anthem of Wor.” There are the trademark creepy atmospheres and samples on “Astral Sexual Predator” and plenty of static and white noise mixed up with the frenetic beats of “Hawking Chakras.” Towards the latter half of the CD, things get marginally mellower, with the glitched-out drippy echoes of “Aleatoric Funk” summoning up visions of pot-smoking swamp creatures. “Polaris” gives us not only broken beats but also broken church organs, while “Garmonbozia” finishes things off with eerie, minimal drones. As a bonus track, we get about a half-minute’s worth of toy keyboards and incomprehensible singing that puts Biz Markie and Wesley Willis to shame, reminding us that while Dave Wright may be the self-described “Dark Jedi of techno,” he’s got at as much of R2D2’s slapstick in him as he does Darth Vader’s sinister gloom. All in all, Carrion Sounds has everything a Not Breathing fan could want, and plenty to draw in new fans as well.