George from breaking world records sent in this release from Bromp Treb. Bromp Treb is a guy named Neil Young from all over MA and looking up his various projects he's been manipulating sounds with all kinds of experimental rock/noise makers in the New England Area.
This is kind of a mini-concept 7" and a goldmine of alternative percussion sounds/noise.
This is most definitely and exercise in stereo and if your speakers are sufficiently separated, there's practically two tracks of sounds happening here. I'm tempted to play it a few times with the balance all the way left or right for two completely different tracks.
The artwork is great also. It looks like George does a lot of the design/prints for the releases on his label, everything from the ducktails single to this Bromp Treb release. The illustration has this kind of vintage, faded carnival sideshow flyer look...and the center labels on the single itself look like old heavy woodcuts from illustrated manuscripts...really a nice touch for everything on the label whose motto is 'awkward music, obsolete formats'.
Side A, entitled 'Twins' consists of thousands of individual parts...squeaking gates, bubbling, popping noises, all super clean...ultra-realistic....I want to say organic. Definitely recorded source material, not sampled or electronically generated.
Things like nails in a coffee can, a tiny length of chain rattling... It's playing with my environment..I can't tell if someone is opening the gate to my building outside or it's the single.
It's just getting plain eerie at times.
Like the metal door is opening to the mad scientists lab, the beakers are bubbling. Glass is scraped against itself and every other sound in my apartment is adding to the tracks, like the rotating turntable.
I keep checking the end gutter of the vinyl to see when it's over... if that's an endless loop at the end or just everything else around me making this quiet noise.
It's like in the typical horror movie opening.... that quiet unsettling moment right before everything goes completely wrong. The tumbleweeds are blowing, the sun is going down, the rusty gate is swinging in the wind. Something bad is about to happen.
It's all these sounds recorded and then manipulated on tape. Stick a finger on the rollers and slow it down to really distance yourself from the source. It's an exercise in everything hit, bashed, and banged....recorded to tape and bent to the breaking point.
Someone is slowly opening a dry glass jar with a metal lid...inside your head...like fingernails on a chalkboard.
It's impossible to distinguish parts of this from the low hum of heating ducts, or the stove, or the refrigerator.
The B-Side 'Birdie Flies' takes a more traditional approach to the struck. It's pure drum/cymbal sounds sounds also manipulated after the fact, playing with the source material. All disjointed, slowing them down turning into slow metal hits. There's that really warbly sounding hits from thin metal strips hit from all lengths, up and down the bar. Bending with a twang. It ends with some toms.
This is pure sound collage based on a live/unprocessed element. It might have been done from something around the time of the 'Bricktown Shuffle' cassette release which you can get a sense of the tracks here.
The amount of material and conceptual ideas here is staggering, it's going to take a while to make my way through it all, but this is a great place to start....I'm beginning to think I need to find an old Walkman cassette player while I'm at it. That's just what I need...to have to find more space for music.
For all those digitally inclined there's a bunch of older Bromp Treb releases are here to download in all kbps qualities as well.
I also came across this split Bromp Treb/ Warber single on Deathbombarc.
Good luck, by the time you catch up with his prolific body of work...he will have been working on new projects and you'll have to start all over.
It's a vicious cycle.
