Here’s a monotonous grind, for sure, but a good one…Dominic Lash and Seth Cooke vibrate their appendages for over 59 mins on egregore (INTONEMA int024), producing an intense and inescapable drone in a highly remorseless manner. It’s realised with electronics, cymbals, and microphones, and inside this monolithic eructation you may find a world of teeming low tones and high tones which swarm within its implacable mass like poisonous mosquitoes. Especially poignant is the cover art image, showing details of something called a “network chart”. The circular shape, letters, numbers, percentages and lines printed in several colours must all mean something; I would regard it as a basic index of pain, a dial by which these fiends can gauge how much agony they can inflict on the human ear, mind, body and spirit. In fact it seems to have been derived from, among other things, data pulled from the Discogs interactive website.
Ilia Belorukov, whose label this is, is himself not averse to a good helping of brutal process art in his daily pudding, and sometimes it seems the more pointless it is, the more of it he shovels into his gullet and then asks for second helphings. These two English monsters have been growling many an electronic purr in my direction via the agencies of labels such as Hideous Replica and Wasted Capital Since 2013, and of course LF Records and Every Contact Leaves A Trace. Sometimes they are minimal utterances, but this is far from that; egregore is one of those five-by-five concreto droners that pretty much crowd you out of your own house (matter of fact, I’m booked to meet the estate agent tomorrow). Sometimes they have released their extended grunters on cassette and CDR, but in this instance only the full-length 60-minute capacity of a proper CD can satisfy their needs and desires.
In all, a highly successful meld of throbbing electronics with the sort of metallic cymbal-vibrating that artists like Mark Wastell and Eddie Prevost have tried to turn into a fine-art improvising craft, now rethought as some sort of brutal anti-personnel weapon…buy now and prepare to meet your maker, who will reveal to you that your were a cyborg all along. From 9th February 2018.