Ducks Battle Satan

By golly I’m enjoying this at  the moment. Werewolf Jerusalem is, as someone much cleverer than I  put it, Richard Ramirez’s “Wall of Static” noise project. What an apt description because these six tracks are meditations in the dynamics of static. This is my first experience with Ramirez’s work and the thing that strikes me about this record is the way that static can be used to create pieces of sound which somehow move and evolve and at time bloom. Static is  one of the harshest elements used in “noise” and the thought of an entire record of just that element might sound like a bit of a slog and frankly an unnecessary assault on the ears. The interesting thing about static is that by its very nature it is always moving, always kinetic. Ramirez manages to place  this element on a potter’s wheel and moulds and shapes  the sound as it continuously moves into both thick impenetrable walls and wafer thin slices of fragility. He layers it, stretches it and plays with its internal dynamics. I’m not sure if I understand the visceral theme displayed in the cover and the titles. I think that sometimes those things can be a distraction to just how good some of these records are. If you told me that a record based on walls of static would open up new ways of hearing sound I would have scoffed but this is immensely enjoyable and listening to it has lead to me approach “noise  in a new context.

This entry was posted on June 26, 2011 at 12:28 pm and is filed under Music, noise, Richard Ramirez, Werewolf Jerusalem. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.