Tuesday, April 8, 2014

CASSETTE REVIEW: Long Distance Poison “Mirror Totality” (Moss Archive)


            Not that long ago, I reviewed a cassette by Clearing called “Distance” and one of the types of distances I thought about in those songs was long distance, particularly the long distance relationship.   Now we have Long Distance Poison, which I take to mean slowly killing someone from afar, but I don’t really hear the distance in this cassette.  I do, however, hear the poison.

            The sound of a low, synth static drone emits itself almost entirely throughout “Mirror Totality”.  There are very brooding beats, and in many ways this just feels like it’s building up to something and that something seems to be the kill.   There are some beeping loops on Side A and all I can think about is how when you’re in the hospital and your pulse is going.  It would have been quite eerie to hear the solid drone of said beeping at the end of Side A because I would have then definitely recognized that the poison had set in and our subject was dead.

            Side B takes us away from the crawl to death though, as we get some of those Knight Rider type waves coming through and begin to border on 8bit.   I begin to think that maybe “Mirror Totality” is not about death after all, but rather about life.  It’s about survival.  It’s about being on the brink of death—about coming so close that you can see God—and then somehow coming back to life.   That is something that I know a lot about personally, and I know a lot of other people who do too.  For some, this might be as close as they get to it—is listening to this cassette—and that’s okay.  





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