Nothing- The Spine Overshadowed by the Rope

Artist: Nothing
CD Title: The Spine Overshadowed By The Rope
Label: Triumvirate
Reviewer: Matthew Johnson
Date: 8/18/05

This release, from Jason William Walton of metal band Agalloch and Michael Hensley of dark ambient projects Yen Pox and Blood Box, crams seventy minutes of music into two long tracks. The first part, "Words That Break The Teeth," is ambient music for the extremely patient, with painstakingly slow builds of soft, fuzzy feedback punctuated by distant clanking, moans, and cymbals. Though eerie, its cacophony is gentle enough to be almost soothing. "Words That Dislocate The Jaw," on the other hand, is noisy and merciless. Recorded at San Francisco's Troniksfest in 2000, it's full of tape loops and layered samples, apparently from a documentary on killer viruses, all filtered through blasts of power electronics. Towards the end, there's even a segment of instrumental keyboard-based prog-rock, but played through so much distortion that it's more irony than anthem. Raw and grating but with an element of black comedy, it's a track that should appeal to fans of Controlled Bleeding. Segments of the live track were also used to construct the studio piece, so it's interesting to see how Walton and Hensley were able to take something so noisy and confrontational and turn it into something so sedate and unsettling. An interesting release for fans of dark ambient and extreme noise alike.

For more about this release, visit the record label at www.citadel-gate.com.