Noise is an acquired taste requiring an open mind and maybe a little background information. I've never known anyone to hear one noise group and instantly fall in love with the genre. Phil Blankenship's noise project is out to make that fact doubly true. Night of the Bloody Tapes is noise for noise extremists. Its fuzzed out, unrelenting, damaged presentation is confrontational and angry. The attack simply never stops on this record.Troniks
The Cherry Points work with Yellow Swans was loud as hell, but lacked the confrontational edge Blankenship has molded on his latest full-length. For over forty minutes a steady stream of feedback, white noise, and the sounds of fire turned up to ear-bleeding levels pours through the speakers. It isn't lazy noise, it's noise bound and determined to tear some things to shreds, to remove limbs from bodies, and to generally wreak havoc. The cover art and accompanying stickers suggest Blankenship is trying to fuse some B-movie horror with his noise, but I can't imagine this noise as a soundtrack to anything but an orgy of blood. (A real orgy of blood, not a movie version.) The intensity feels so real and unhinged that I finally got a glimpse of how the most extreme of metal and noise gets compared.
I've seen people dance and head bang at noise shows before. I watched and thought it was supposed to be ironic or sarcastic somehow, a product of the scene's disgust for convention. Only a few times have I ever felt noise move my body and that was usually in a violent manner. The Cherry Point convey a heaviness, though, that makes me want to throw up my hands and bang my head until my neck is sore. The ferocity Blankenship has unearthed in the static and rumble of his machines isn't unlike the blister forming guitar work of the heaviest death metal bands. Gone are the growling vocals, replaced by the sheer sound and a total disregard for listenable melodies or conventional rhythms of any kind. Death metal took sound further away from the norms of rock and pop, but noise has sent it over the edge. A live show like this might inspire head banging; it might also cause bleeding ears, spontaneous violence, and rioting. This does not bode well for Hollywood, Blankenship's base of operation. I find it interesting that some of the most extreme music this side of the Pacific is coming from the land of plastic surgery and generally fake dispositions. Either Blankenship is tapped into the violence that is bubbling just below the surface or he's giving everyone a taste of where that senseless, star-worshipping, shallow approach to everything can go.
That said, I'm surprised by how many times I've hit the play button on this disc. There are plenty of noise records I enjoy listening to about once a month. Night of the Bloody Tapes has found its way into my car, onto my computer's play list, and into my walkman when I go running. I've listened to it three times in the last two days. For all its violent destruction, the constant stream of noise it provides eventually blanks my mind completely. I wouldn't say it puts me in a safe or contemplative place, it just completely zaps my memory and my ability to function. I wouldn't make this my first noise purchase, nor would I heartily recommend it to anyone already listening to noise. This is for the enthusiast, for the noise addict who simply needs something more insane and more intense. Night of the Bloody Tapes is abusively harsh noise and one of the only records of its kind that I've come to enjoy.
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