Hats off to anyone who managed to collect all 13 lathe cuts that this LP compiles, but you can now file them away for a rainy ebay. It’s refreshing to see a label that’s specialised, so far, in miniature runs of lathes attempting to get the music out to a wider audience. As well as being considerably lighter on the wallet, Aryan Asshole Records Compilation Volume 1 is an excellent snapshot of the current cream of the crop in the American underground. Stick this in a time capsule, give it twenty years and it’ll be the new Nuggets.
With this being Nate Young’s (Wolf Eyes) label, this record is unsurprisingly populated with his extended musical family. Dead Machines, Burning Star Core, Failing Lights, Graveyards, Aaron Dilloway and Religious Knives all do their thing, sometimes cutting some of their finest work to date here. The sound, on a technical (‘ooh look at my posh separates stereo’) level, is, as expected with this line-up, uniformly atrocious. But whoever truly cares about getting music only via carefully crafted sound are probably not going to be checking out any of these acts anyway. Combined with that lathe edge, the sound has a border of murkiness and static that only adds to its subterranean feel. The worlds of broken machine where man and weed meet in basements across America.
Amongst the consistently incredible tracks is another in the great run of Failing Lights' subtler material, a woozy Graveyards session and the greasy smeared musical imprint of Charlie Draheim. Snuck away inside these tracks is a recording of NASA chatting to the original moon landing crew, although I have no idea why. This piece very quickly becomes a mild irritant to an otherwise perfect recording, apart from this though the album stands a definitive cross section of a multi-faceted genre.
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