Recent Cleveland transplant Noah Anthony's latest monochrome meditation as Deuce Avenue strips the palette back to barren tones and air vent resonances, pitched to half-speed and filtered through an Arp: Death of Natural Light. Recorded last winter on the heels of his more rhythmic No Rent debut, The Blasting Years, the intention was to create something “very nocturnal and warm.”
This is overtly music of and for the night, slow-motion swaths of hissing steam and cavernous dust, lurking in a shuttered concrete hangar. Layers of subliminal grey haze and emaciated synth emerge and dissipate in slow arcs, like the whispers of long dead machines. The B side piece, “Blood Turns Black,” skews both more erratic and more unsettling: metallic fog, looped footsteps, clattering train tracks. Fleeting audio mirages heard from within a locked trunk.
It's a persuasive return to the blanker, bleaker spectrum of Anthony's work, far from the compact downer synth-pop of recent Profligate recordings. Across its spacious 51 minutes Death radiates a thousand shades of muted menace and shivering negative space, unhurried, unrelenting, and unforgiving.
-Britt Brown (Not Not Fun Records)
"...a dank, steamy vapor. Contrails of filter-swept hiss slowly develop into a more enigmatic and darkened tonal palette. The ominousness continues to thread its way into the second half of the cassette, fittingly entitled “Blood Turns Black”. Loops of nocturnal jump scare fodder coalesce into rhythms that provide skeletal forms to foil the menace of the more oblique textures. Those who enjoy their horror in slow motion will latch onto these sounds like a facehugger to... well, a person’s face." -Dusted Magazine
"All heard from a vent reaching into the blackness..." -Lost in a Sea of Sound
Art/Layout by Anne Quinones
Mastered by t e l e p a t h テレパシー能力者 / Virtual Dream Plaza
virtualdreamplaza.com
released December 21, 2020