February 23, 2009 • Misanthropic Agenda
The late 2000s were a great time for noise: after it started to really catch on in the late '90s and early '00s artists began to get a better handle on how to create some really interesting textures, atmospheres, themes, and moods. Jason Crumer is starting to become pretty popular in the noise scene, and a favorite of mine, as his material is really interesting stuff. His last album, 2007's Ottoman Black, was a really great—and frightening—combination of ambient, sound effects, drone and the like, punctuated with harsh noise. On Walk with Me, things seem a bit more subdued and perhaps less interesting than the previous release, but it's sill an enjoyable listen.
Where Ottoman Black seemed to focus mostly on mood and atmosphere (to great effect), Walk with Me focuses more on texture and sound in a manner more "traditional" to other, older noise. While there is still obviously a lot of sample manipulation and the like, the sounds are so processed that they become much more abstract. There is also a lot of layering akin to most Merzbow where the different sounds and textures are played off each other pretty well. The tracks on this album are quite a bit longer than before, giving the pieces more time to find their footing and evolve. This is probably at least partly due to the fact that there is a good bit more drone this time around, which makes me think of a much less harsh version of Kevin Drumm's Sheer Hellish Miasma in places. The noise elements, when they are present (see the first and last tracks in particular), are more complex as well as some of the individual sounds themselves get complicated, sometimes coming on and off in fits and stutters in a nice contrast to the drone.
The more subdued parts (i.e. most of the droning on the longer tracks) can get a bit irritating, though, as Crumer relies on a lot of repetition to build up the tracks. For instance, "Love Is More Important than Pride" is incredibly repetitive with just two grating drone samples, and I was disappointed that just about when the track started to get interesting it was over. The first half of "Luscious Voluptuous Pregnant" consists of basically piano samples bouncing around the audial space. It's interesting for a little bit, but drags on after a while. When the noise kicks in around halfway through, it's much more welcome. Similarly, "Walk with Me" is similar with a slow, quite, droning opening that evolves into heavily-layered drones and subtle noise throughout, which actually makes listening to the track as whole rewarding as the ending is really quite good.
The standout exception is "Sexual Artifacts" which, while a mostly subdued track, contains very little in the way of the textures that appear on the rest of the album, instead including some scary effects and sounds which could have been lifted straight from Ottoman Black. It's a good track, but it sounds a bit out of place here.
As a whole, it's a very cold album, though, and very distant, and I imagine hard to get into. It's also difficult to listen to attentively as it alternates between alienating the listener with drones and then grabbing their attention again with sudden bursts and swellings of noise and sound. It's arguable that this sort of method is what makes an album like this good, and I might agree with that as I find very alienating music to be very interesting (not necessarily good, but definitely interesting), but again it can get a little dull in places when it the tracks take too long to get going.
For me, Walk with Me definitely isn't as good as Ottoman Black, and that's maybe because it wasn't quite what I was expecting from Crumer; however it's still a good listen and perhaps a good alternative to other drone/noise albums like Sheer Hellish Miasma. I don't think it says too much about what we can expect for noise in the rest of the '10s but if it was more like this I don't think I'd be terribly disappointed.
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