Raiser documents a high-water mark in Sissy Spacek’s ever-challenging discography—a Los Angeles Bronson session from 2013 uniting Phil Blankenship (The Cherry Point, Troniks), Charlie Mumma, and John Wiese for a work that crystallizes everything volatile and deeply considered in the band’s approach to experimental noise. Since their inception, Sissy Spacek has been singular in pushing the limits where harsh noise, noisegrind, and electro-acoustic experimentation overlap, carving a space that is both violently physical and conceptually sophisticated. Here, the trio crafts a maelstrom of deconstructed sound: cut-up aesthetics meld with turbulent swathes of feedback, collapsing scrap metal, and abrasive lo-fi textures. Every gesture is subject to sudden rupture or dissolution—sheets of distortion jitter and squall, bass rumbles coagulate into dense fields, and electronic blurts surface through surges of hiss and decomposing signal. Scream fragments are disassembled and rebuilt in real time, locked into churns of sonic rubble with a precision that feels nearly architectural in its brutality.
Yet within this din, the record never loses grip on compositional intent. Raiser’s noise is not only primal but planned—each eruption and abrasion mapped within a shifting electro-acoustic landscape, reminiscent at times of The Haters or the abstract onslaughts of Incapacitants. There’s a constant sense of oncoming collapse: the music devours itself, only to reconstitute in waves of unexpected form, creating both terror and catharsis in its wake. Sissy Spacek’s Raiser is a formidable entry in their catalogue, representing the band at their most uncompromising and unpredictable. For listeners drawn to the extremes of sonic art, it remains a testament to the group’s commitment to pushing the boundaries of possibility in noise and improvisation.
