VOTD 4/23/2023

 Cut Hands: Festival of the Dead (Blackest Ever Black)

Purchased at The Attic

Feh, too much autobiography here, and enough piano music.

An impulse buy from the The Attic's used bins. My wife is listening (loudly) to one of the Rod Stewart great American songbook CDs. I never liked Rod Stewart, though I suppose he's better at singing those songs that I thought he might be. Anyone, I needed some antidote to that, sitting down here in my studio.

Cut Hands is the project of William Bennett, of Whitehouse infamy. I've written here before about being uncertain which noise artists were pro-fascist/Nazi, and which are putting up a front. Whitehouse could be abusive and awful, but in the end they were never a band that could live their hype. "Songs" about serial killers even from the killers's perspective, they're not really doing those things, are they?

Some time during the final years of Whitehouse, William became enamored of African percussion. So the pulseless din of Whitehouse gave way to the metered, sequenced Cut Hands. Most of the materials here are driving percussion, hard hitting, compressed, very in-your-face. There's some synth sounds too, but it's at least 80% percussive.

I certainly understand the point of the minimalism, and I do find this more interesting than the Thomas Brinkmann album from a few days back. Some tracks build up more materials, such as "Parataxic Distortion", which its echoey string/synth sounds and hard hitting synth bass line. It's not all just drum patterns. The more synth-oriented tracks to provide more balance, more contrast to the all-percussion pieces.

Even though Bennett is effective at building these instrumental ensembles, I think it would all be more interesting if people were playing these parts, and it wasn't all sequenced in Ableton Live (I'm just guessing his tools). The performances would have more dynamism, and the sound of beaters hitting skin or wood would be more interesting. 

I could see a track from this as being very exciting if slipped into the right slot of a hard hitting industrial dance club event. But....how about more of the synthscapes? They're pretty good.