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Providien, "Followed by a Wraith"
With its "fuck you" attitude to any sort of musical or genre conventions and raw, broken four track analog aesthetic, this Ohio duo’s work recalls other artists, but sounds like no one else at all.
Tracks like "Group Birth" hover closer to the world of harsh noise via high frequency alert tones and maxed out rhythms, and "No Other" uses sloppy rhythms and overly distorted synths with megaphone shouted vocals.It’s not the full on endurance test of a Merzbow record, but it’s definitely more abrasive than some of the other songs here.Even though "Sewer Animals" opens with some obvious guitar, the percussive playing style of it and growling noises are anything but musical.
"Red Man's Vietnam" feels like some sort of black metal and electronica bastard hybrid, with the slowed down and distorted demon voices and rudimentary synth blurps, but paired with 8 bit video game music and guttural, destroyed static bursts."No Us" is cut from a similar cloth, but with toy keyboards and a rattling garage-door spring bass line."Salmonella Bunker Blues" also allows some metal to be heard, pushed on by a terse, punchy drum machine and echoed, otherworldly vocals.
While there's a lot of over-driven noise and feedback to be heard, there also is a fair helping of music that sneaks in.The analog drum machine bits on the title track push the otherwise everything in the red noise vibe into something entirely different.In other circumstances it is even more pronounced:even with the loose, rattling metal string scrapes of "Next One," the vocals end up making the song into some bizarre, shit-faced take on folk music."Keep Searching" also allots more breathing room, but with the overt guitars and sweeping, dramatic flourishes, it takes on a different vibe entirely.
I did feel a shared vibe with Wolf Eyes in Providien's ramshackle, home-taped noise and musical outbursts, but the two projects are really quite different.There is more of a sense of musicality on Followed by a Wraith, even though its often obscured by maxed out volume levels or the paring of elements that are, on the surface, contradictory.Even with the darkness that pervades a lot of these songs, it’s still a hell of a lot of fun.
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