Kassette Kulture #12- Arklight - Set Up on Different Crosses

from epicenesound



The beats here have a scary rattling window aesthetic… or are they guitars? I honestly can’t tell… Everything’s getting louder, more distorted as those Arklight boys work up some steam. Intermittently, vocal wails break through the cacophony as the canvas is filled up in hard-edged scratchiness. Wiry tendrils scrape the paint off the walls in nasty chunks, becoming amplified thickets rubbing each other up the wrong way… right until the freight train brakes are applied and everything is transformed into a sludge of slowing apparatus.

A lone siren starts off the second track closely followed by loose drum malfunction and a few random strings, and then the fun starts all over again as a circus of drum machines spew up their guts – feeding you a raw diet of berserko-beat ratio and fire crackers. Guitars ricochet off the skips, thuds and broken clattering; briefly the distorted cries of sirens become mutant bag pipes, then they disappear into the scuffle of agitated boots giving somebody a real kicking... those hi-hats are whipping like hail, everything is shuddering in a ziggurat of amp skuzz.

The second side starts with a fairly structured beat, bracketed by some pleasing metallic after-shocks, until it’s plunged into a sleet of needle-like percussion. Loving that rot of thrown guitars, that aesthetic of a thousand shattering mirrors, or is it the infinite sound of mouse traps snapping shut? – An electronic fracas gouging its way over the top, dragging its bony knuckles.

For the final track, the beats randomly fire off; while a countdown is dribbling in the background. Repetition, then calculation, a hungry device clanks around impatiently. Suddenly guitar mayhem falls from the skies, setting everything alight in a mangled choreography. Guitars stumble around in tune asphyxiation, rubbing in opposites.

Looking at the cover, it’s as if all that noise Arklight are throwing at you has been translated into the image. A Madonna surrounded by a junkyard of rotten crosses, as the dirty and haphazard noise wraps your head like a pack of muzzled dogs chasing their tails. All too briefly, an oasis of echoed smashing / clanking opens up - a reprieve cut short, as an angle poised grinder flips in/out of the counter’s slow demise. Fret Hammers close the curtains, a cloak of dust still gripping the air.

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