POG

Thanks to adrenaline provided by last week's No Fun Winter Ends Destruction at the sadly death-bedded Tonic (as well as some nice enouragement from several in attendance, thanks), Noiseweek is officially attempting re-animation. The biggest challenge at our bunkered, cereal-strewn HQ is clearing time to seek out not-so-known noise, so please keep/start sending stuff and we'll do our best to make this a weekly (or at least bi-monthly) concern again. Many thanks to everyone who asked.

Our return was also inspired by a gift from the tireless Albany stronghold known as FlippedOut Records. We had already been enjoying the last Burnt Hills missive (watch for tons more where that came from via Qbico, Ruby Red, Lotus Sound, etc), so we were pretty stoked to rip open the first sonic stab by Pog, a.k.a. Paula of Burnt Hills. Mitote is 66 minutes of muffled, hiss-laden scare-sonics, the kind my brain seems pre-wired to soak up. I'm just a sucker for anything unclear, and Pog's ghostly rattlings, creep-infested clangings, and nightmarish drippings are all prime murk. The closest referent I can conjure is the Handful of Dust stuff that involves strings of any manner, but even those cloudy classics are clearer than Pog's haze-locked mix; everything here is so cloaked in sonic distance that it's weirdly anyonymous, as if the sounds were stuck in some limbo, lost to drift through the air like fog hanging over their maker's grave. I seriously have felt some of these tracks pass through me like spectres, which probably says more about my current need for medication than about Pog, but I'm coherent enough to know that Mitote should freeze anyone susceptible to the pleasures of mental paralysis.

My favorite example of Pog's nerve-stiffening is "Remember" (linked below). It takes a wispy, vaguely-backwards loop of violin-bending (reminiscent of Axolotl or even Tony Conrad if one of his shorter tracks was hacked up and rearranged), and rides it out into a warped horizon of softening focus and increasing blur. Like a lot of Mitote, it uses a simple idea to create a complex atmosphere, providing a ripe context for your own aural hallucinations. Those less inclined to paint their own nightmares might see nothing, but that's kinda the genius of Pog - her stuff is sneaky enough to slip past the guards into the synapses of those of us whose receptors crave it.

mp3:
POG - "Remember" from Mitote