Ramleh

Classic crushing industrial noise / power electronics from 1983! A limited vinyl edition of legendary noise act Ramleh's side of the classic split-album A Return To Slavery album, originally released in 1983 on Broken Flag. As the original record was a split, this reissue fills in the other side with Ramleh's The Hand Of Glory EP. The sound is a murky wall of gravel throated noise pocked with distant yelps from Mundy in sonic fisticuffs with variety of cassette sampled political speeches, whose content and context are garbled through the noise. Grim. Devastating. Utterly compelling. In lieu of the Best material, the flip side contains all of the material from the equally impressive The Hand Of Glory single also from that same year, though those recordings were later reissued as 12" through a Hospital Productions / Harbinger Sound venture. It too is a tangled clog of aggressive noise, voice and throttled distortion with Gary Mundy's existential shrieks and moans posited within the morass of noise. Through recordings such as this, Ramleh established a template for noise art that embraced the corrosive aspects of sound only touched upon at the time by contemporaries such as Merzbow and Whitehouse (though both later employed the full-frequency noise assault within a few years).