This CD-R by Papercut has moments of brilliance amid stretches of standard, by the book noise. By no means is it a masterpiece of noise but it's not a lazy effort by anyone's standards. There are enough shades of detail to make this a rewarding listen even if it won’t light the world on fire.
This self-titled release is better than I was expecting. The best way to describe it is elemental. The single track starts off sounding like a distant avalanche that progressively gets closer and closer. Gary Morrison, the man behind Papercut, shows a lot of patience, not going for the money shot too soon. Instead he slowly builds up peaks of noise before setting up a bass heavy lull. He repeats this over the thirty minutes using different textures. As it goes on there are sounds like icy winds roaring through the speakers. These sounds dissipate and low growls and squeals of feedback come to the forefront. The music is constantly changing, Morrison stops himself from getting stuck in a routine.
The last four or five minutes of the CD is seriously heavy. Pops and farts of fuzzy noise bubble over an intense roaring rhythm. It rounds off the track nicely, the preceding 25 minutes teased me along and this blast of power at the end provides the aforementioned money shot. The structure of the piece indicates that this wasn’t a random composition of odds and ends of tape but that there was some sort of outline that Morrison was following, giving a stronger piece overall.
As I expected from the name of the label, this release is heavily indebted to everything that was ever released on American Tapes, right down to the painted CD-R. I think it’s great that this sort of music is having an effect on artists but at the same time Morrison hasn’t really pushed the genre in any direction. It sounds great but at the end of the day there is little to separate this from the likes of Hive Mind or Wolf Eyes (when they’re having a good day). There are flashes of inspiration during the CD so I cling to the hopes that future releases will reveal more character and innovation.
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