Must Die Records / Wrested Thread / Bedawang

Wrested Thread
Must Die Records. CD. MDR 017

Bedawang - Skin=Deception
Must Die Records. CD. MDR 020


Contact: http://mustdierecords.co.uk/


The war against CD’s began in earnest with an offloading of a bag of MDR stuff to Campbell HQ. I had an inkling that he’d take to Nigel Joseph’s Mogodon beats and as it happened I was right. Those thick, syrupy doom laden beats layered all over with hundreds and thousands of diddly diddly guitar notes, the soundtracks to numerous nights in on the Fylde coast with nothing more than prescription drugs for company and the bang bang bang of someone hitting their head against a council flat wall went down like a stripper on a stag do.

And after having my negative thoughts regarding MDR checked somewhat by the sublime Bad Suburban Nightmare I was hoping for something heading more into that kind of territory [think esoteric, tumbleweed, Ry Cooder on a windswept Morecambe Bay in January kind of feel] what I got instead was one middling work of muddling noise and one 
of a rather more rewarding experimental nature.

Wrested Thread got off to a bad start after I visited the MDR website during a spot of pre-listening fact checking. There I was met by these words ‘“…pure aural abuse – certainly not one for the faint hearted”. Labeling your work with such an epithet I regard as rather foolhardy for there is no way on earth that you are ever going to fulfill such a claim. Pure aural abuse is what you get from the missus for coming home at seven in the morning pissed out of your brains minus a shoe with vomit down your shirt. Pure aural abuse is what The New Blockaders sound like coming at you through a 5000 watt PA system. Pure aural abuse is not what I got from Wrested Thread. What I did get was Astral Social Club on Blackpool drugs. Segue the tracks, replace painkillers with Timothy Taylors and you have a rather dull Astral Social Club album. I didn’t even approach it with caution, such is my nonchalance and lack of self preservation when inserting CD’s.

Things improved no end with Bedawang. Bedawang being the Belgian experimenter Christof Becu [who carries no epithets at all on the MDR website]. Not surprisingly I was more inclined to linger longer in Christof’s world seeing as how it contained sounds that were of recurring interest. The 24 minute closer ‘Blaschko’s Lines’ is the pick of the bunch; a taught affair in which the radiating therms of banked glow lamps buckle and fizz giving us a tempered noise drone that hardly alters through its course. The five preceding, and shorter, tracks range from star pulse radiation glitch to Sähkö like analogue beat. Becu sails close to the apocalyptic wasteland shores as created by the likes of Mika Vainio and encapsulates some of that feeling whilst adding touches of industrial ambience; half lidded pulses, deep rhythms, astronauts breathing, keeping the whole sixty minutes interesting enough to warrant return visits. More from Mr Becu please.


Must Die Records, even if they're only getting it half right are at least worthy of attention.