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Tarab, "I'm Lost"
The title of this Australian artist’s latest album is extremely fitting.  Passages of roughly edited tape, collages of indecipherable found sounds, and bizarre production is disorienting at best, and downright baffling much of the time.  It is because of this confusing, jarring, and sometimes frightening nature that the disc works so well.
This is my first experience with Eamon Sprod’s work, so I was not fully sure what to expect past the initial sound clip that I heard.  Of course, the intentionally vague (yet beautiful) artwork does nothing to elucidate things much, something I doubt was an accident.  The first of the five untitled compositions is an appropriately forceful introduction, and is gripping to say the least.Very lo-fi field recordings are paired with white noise bursts and subsonic bass that pummels through a jerky stop/start jump cut editing, and this is just the first 30 seconds.  Mechanical clattering, birds chirping, a passing train and what could be a tape recorder left in an oil drum as it rolls down a steep hill appear in the following five minutes.
The middle pieces are a bit less chaotic, but only marginally so.  The second is largely built upon hollow hums and ghostly scrapes, occasionally interrupted by a razor sharp outburst or crackling texture that builds to an aggressive jet engine roar before pulling back to a dull hum.Sprod mixes subsonic bass and jump cut noise for a chaotic opening of the third piece before scaling back to an ominous rattle that stays more consistent through the remainder of the composition.
The final two pieces are more akin to opening in terms of frenetic noise and pure dissonance.Eamon uses static bursts and digital edits effectively on the fourth piece, mixing up the shimmering harsh noise and crackling textures.  Paired with the unidentifiable junk found sounds, Sprod shifts between pensive ambience and abrasive chaos at a ridiculous pace.  The final piece might begin at a low volume crinkling, but what could be a microphone scraped on a gravel driveway prevents it from being anything but ambient.  Distant talking and cricket chirps might sound peaceful, but violent clattering noise is anything but.
The absurdist, junky noise collages of I’m Lost reminded me of Sudden Infant or Runzelstirn & Gurgelstock’s work, but without the organic, occasionally nauseating component both Joke Lanz and Rudolf Eb.er are fond of exploiting.  The harshness, aggression and unpredictable production is consistent with that scene though. Violent, sometimes unpleasant, and infrequently introspective, I’m Lost is a schizophrenic, but brilliant mass of sound.
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