Phil Blankenship’s harsh noise project remains one of the most intense I’ve had the (dis?)pleasure of hearing. 2004 saw the release of three 3" compact discs from The Cherry Point, each on a different label. Blankenship has been kind enough to round all three up into one package and it’s a good thing he did, too. The Cherry Point sound more intimidating than intense on this collection, the use of open space serves the project well.
Troniks/PACrec
Each track is over 15 minutes in length, each apparently revolves around a theme of witchcraft or "witchery" as portrayed by countless movies, and each sounds more dreadful than what I expected The Cherry Point to be capable of producing. Not that I felt Blankenship’s music was without subtly, but the last time around it really was: his noise is without a doubt punishing, a blunt instrument if I’ve ever heard one. That bluntness was impressive, but the work that appears on Black Witchery is doubly so.
The noise is still assaulting and relentless, but it is also tempered by a diversity that Night of the Bloody Tapes was missing entirely. Amidst all the gurgling, chainsaw-ripping-through-flesh tones are moments of high pitched squeals, metallic machineguns with rhythm, uneasy shivers, and cavernous bellows: Blankenship has stepped up the gore and fright factor by letting the mind have room enough to imagine the terrible. There isn’t so much noise here that it is impossible to think about anything else.
Making this racket more appealing is the fact that each track is massively different from the other. "Virgin Witch" gets my vote for "most likely to deafen small children and the elderly." It’s attack is more constant than what the other pieces produce, despite the fact that there are three or four distinct layers of very different noise providing its current. Plenty of noise gets its intensity from blending plenty of sound into one big rumble, but The Cherry Point succeeds in being powerful without the use of that tactic. I don’t think it could cause the spontaneous combustion of small animals, but it is a vicious piece of work.
"Devil’s Witch" and "Season of the Witch," on the other hand, sound like the nightmares of abduction victims as filtered through the eyes and ears of a witness on massive amounts of hallucinogens. Their quality is more comparable to a found sound or environmental piece than it is to a pure noise track. At several points during both of these I got the distinct feeling I was listening to some kind of snuff recording. It’s a welcome change for me, in the end. I liked hearing The Cherry Point annihilate the known universe, but listening to the way the world looks just before the final apocalyptic moment is far more disturbing.
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