On his latest tape, Anthony Mangicapra again explores the sounds and textures of metals in order to find their hidden beauty. Carefully layered and manipulated, the source materials are transformed into a higher form; divinity wrenched from cold, hard matter. This is a vastly different beast to his other recently cassette Ship of the Desert; this is sound both liberated and liberating from reality.
"A Rain of Iron" consists of a chopped loop of what sounds like it used to be classical music, a high pitched whine and heavily distorted percussive noises. These phase in and out with each other to create a constantly shifting body of sound; somewhere Steve Reich is asleep and his dreams are plagued with horrors. Suddenly the loop is dropped into the body of an old piano whose rusty strings clang, sing and shout in surprising ways before falling silent forever.
On the other side of the tape is another decaying, scraping abyss. On "An Early Fluid State," the sound of heavy metal objects being dragged across a floor provides a backdrop for a celestial mix of keyboard tones and what sounds like a vibraphone. The metallic noise blends into some heavily abused saxophone (or so it appears, this could be all just a by-product of Mangicapra’s audio collage) to create another nightmarish void.
The incongruity and amorphousness of the sounds used here by Mangicapra are like a painting by Francis Bacon. There are clues as to what sort of scene is being described (the rooms that pervade Bacon’s works find parallels in the solid sound sources used by Mangicapra) but with both artists there is a primal, emotive centre that overrides any sense of familiarity. The roar of Mangicapra’s audio work could easily come from the mouths of Bacon’s screaming popes.
 
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