Mouths Agape - Verrückt

 Released: May 2

Verrückt, for a noise piece, takes a surprisingly dynamic and often minimal approach. The entire release is just a single roughly twenty minute track, but there’s quite a lot packed in here. It starts out really subtle, with just a single bit of noise grinding away in the foreground. There’s also a bit of vocals in there that are coated in layers of processing, sounding rather unusual for most of their presence. But the track carries on rather subtly, though still noisy. But about midway through, some new vocal snippets appear. These short bursts of vocals barely comprised complete thoughts but they give a rather neat precursor to the upcoming madness. A quickly questioning voice asks “You ok?,”another sincerely say “thanks man,” and a woman’s voice remarks something rather unintelligible about screaming. A couple minutes of this and suddenly the noise explodes into pure chaos. The voices continue but the pure insanity of the noise scramble takes over. It’s wonderfully beautiful madness all around. 

It’s a bit hard to decipher where the noise is originating from, but it finds itself alongside more gentle sounds oftentimes. There’s some definitively field recording-esque sounds including the sound of running water and ambient nature sounds. Unsure if this is where the blistering noise comes from but th combination is quite wonderful. It gives you these moments of quiet peace, like things are shifting in a more ambient or musique concrete kind of direction, only to suddenly bash you upside the head with a wave of cacophony. I absolutely love the hyper-dynamic approach as it gives your mind a moment to reset, maybe even be lulled into a more relaxed state only for that moment of quiet to be suddenly upended.