Strain of Laws – Live Non‑Plus Ultra is a raw snapshot of two long‑running underground infrastructures colliding in real time. Captured at Non‑Plus Ultra in Los Angeles, November 2025, the recording documents the live debut of Strain of Laws in their home city: Aaron Hemphill (Nonpareils, Liars, Sissy Spacek) on voice and electronics, and John Wiese on electronics. Both have spent years reconfiguring what “band”, “song” or even “set” can mean; here, they choose to work as minimally as possible in terms of personnel and maximally in terms of pressure, building an ominous haze of deep bass and slurred speech that feels less like a performance and more like a weather event rolling through a room.
The sound they forge at Non‑Plus Ultra sits closer to concrete industrial and noise than to any recognizable rock lineage. Hemphill’s voice appears as a destabilised presence: phrases half‑formed or smeared beyond intelligibility, muttered mantras chewed up by distortion, breath turned into rhythm. It’s not “frontman” work so much as one more unstable signal in the mix, something human trying and mostly failing to push through the fog. Wiese, for his part, shapes the ground underfoot—a low‑end that heaves and shudders, high‑frequency grit that flickers at the edge of pain, sudden voids that swallow everything for a beat or two before the next impact lands. Together they construct an environment where language is barely hanging on and the body feels what the sound is doing long before the brain can parse it.
As a live document, Live Non‑Plus Ultra keeps the edges intact. You hear the sense of a room filling up with vibration, the way long tones and bass surges reshape the air, the slight instability that comes from riding feedback and chance rather than locking into pre‑plotted grids. There are no clear “songs”, just evolving blocks of density and murk, occasionally pierced by a recognisable vocal contour or a sudden, almost musical interval in the electronics. That’s the tension that drives the set: the push and pull between obliteration and emergence, between an ominous undifferentiated roar and the small, unsettling details—an inflection in Hemphill’s delivery, a glitch in Wiese’s signal chain—that stick in the ear.
Non‑Plus Ultra, with its reputation for DIY intensity and late‑night experimentalism, is an apt setting. The venue’s scale and ethos let Strain of Laws play at the threshold where control and collapse meet, and the recording leans into that: this is not a cleaned‑up simulation, but a faithful capture of a particular evening when two veterans of dissonance chose to move slowly, ominously, rather than sprint toward overload. Fans of Hemphill’s work with Liars and Nonpareils will recognise his instinct for turning pop’s ghost into something warped and muttered; followers of Wiese’s vast noise and composition catalog will hear his ear for structure under chaos. Live Non‑Plus Ultra binds those instincts into a single, foreboding continuum—one that suggests that, for Strain of Laws, the most telling statements happen when the words barely make it out and the sub‑bass does most of the talking.
