Sissy Spacek's Gong stands as a testament to the project's singular command of avant-garde noise. This new CD edition, expanded with additional material, doubles the sonic territory first mapped by the cassette release for Torn Light. The core album unfolds across two sidelong works—“The Entropy Effect” and “Pierced Ears”—each meticulously woven from collisions of junk metal, decaying electronics, and threads of musical debris. On “The Entropy Effect,” Sissy Spacek unfurl a suite of seemingly random destruction events: shattering metallic crashes, cryptic environmental textures, damaged samples, piano fragments, and smears of crumbling orchestral sound. Tape-edit cut-ups and bursts of demonic bass shadow the composition, inviting echoes of Stockhausen or K2, but with the band’s own caustic grace. Out of this chaos, moments of strange, ambiguous beauty bob and vanish: mumbled voices, eerie delays, and ghostly soundscapes flirt with a structural sense that never quite settles.
The journey continues on “Pierced Ears,” diving deeper into a minefield of glitch, metal detritus, and brittle echoes. Ghostly piano and glazed environmental recordings cross paths with mutated tape-noise, guttural electronics, and near-silence that amplifies unease. The piece is saturated with viscerally unsettling details—skittering percussive hits, occasional creaks and shrieks, as well as inventive delay effects—each element amalgamated in a way that’s hypnotic as it is disorienting. With Gong, Sissy Spacek eschew any limitations of “junk-noise,” crafting instead a highly listenable yet challenging stream of sonic consciousness that mines both brute physicality and subtle compositional wit. The result is a rare marker of vitality in experimental music, celebrating collapse and transformation with a tactile sense of invention—proof that noise, in these hands, is finally free.
