John Wiese, Lasse Marhaug, Kalong

Edition of 300 housed in printed sleeve and full colour jacket. Includes A3 poster and download code redeemable from the label* Uncompromising, devilish noise performances by two intriguing, boundary pushing duos - Lasse Marhaug & John Wiese, and Cologne's Kalong aka Jessika Loers and Melani Wratil - on the very promising Alarm imprint. It's a case of experience superceding youth, as Marhaug and Wiese obliterate the A-side with a maelstrom of fractal, infinitely morphing spatial dynamics and abstract, kinetic sounds ranging from guttural roars to sharply defined metallic prangs and clangs, from oblique stretches of cacophonous inferno to what could be a contact mic rubbed against the interior of a  skull inside a live organism.

The pacing and density of the piece is as malleable as the sounds themselves, dissolving and resolving between colossal black hole densities and gaseous dispersions with a free jazz dexterity. By contrast, Kalong's side, performed and recorded at UFA Palast, Cologne in June 2011, is more linear, gradually amassing layers of caustic, bubbling noise before the gates break and they tumble headfirst through mauling thickets of white noise, scorching solar flare stabs and strobing pulse patterns, to the eerie relief of droning vocals, and back into the fray, all with a wayward force and feel for the kind of visceral sonics which leave open wounds on their way in. (Boomkat)