CASSETTE REVIEW: Secret Face “Career Direction” (Radical Dreamers)

http://radicaldreamersgroup.bandcamp.com/album/career-direction

             Though some artists like to create a sound of static noise, and many of them do so with the power of cassettes, Secret Face uses what appear to be the same ingredients on the surface to generate a different kind of noise.  At first, it sounds like some sort of plague of insects, possibly cicadas.   Synth bass then takes over and we are into what can only be described as minimal 8bit (It might not make sense on paper, but when you hear it you’ll know)

            The first side concludes with a movement similar to what we pick up with on Side B.   There are some drum machine toms played in a rather distorted volume that makes me think of doom, and this is accompanied by loops of almost vocal-like patterns.  My favorite part perhaps comes towards the end of Side A, in which we hear snippets of sound clips, spliced and played at will.  On some level, I feel as if my tape deck is in the middle of an exorcism and that’s cool with me.

            On the flip side, we get slightly heavier, but the beats remain chopped up and served ice cold.  It recalls the Nine Inch Nails song “Head like a Hole”, only it’s all jumbled up.   Beats become loops and as “Career Direction” takes its curtain call it becomes a quiet static.  

            I only can think of this as being a musical accompaniment to what the Bible spoke of as being the seven deadly plagues (There were seven, right?) and in the end they have all come and gone… and the world as we know it has ceased.