Aural Aggravation

Dret Skivor – 4th October 2024

Christopher Niisnibor

Unlike Record Store Day, which has been hijacked by major labels and swamped with overpriced reissues to the point that it no longer benefits any of those it was initially intended to, Bandcamp Friday is something I wholly endorse.

Bandcamp’s model is rather different from other streaming services in that it provides a platform whereby people can pay to actually own the music, be it in digital or physical format. While purchase is available through some – Apple, Amazon – rates for artists aren’t great. Many people have ditched physical media form reasons of convenience and space, but the trouble with streaming – and this doesn’t only apply to music – is that it can be removed from a platform at zero notice, which is irksome when you’re halfway through a series or really want to watch a particular movie… or want to listen to an album. The Internet is not the infinite, permanent archive of everything ever we were promised it would be around twenty-five years ago, and the reason for this can essentially be summarised in one word: capitalism.

Maintaining a site costs. Everything costs. The Internet and – especially streaming services – do not exist for the benefit of either artists or end users, at least not anymore. But here, Bandcamp Friday represents the best of the Internet, in that all proceeds go to artists. And artists deserve, and need, to be paid. Because we need art. It may be massively underappreciated and taken for granted as wallpaper, but humanity needs creative art to survive. It does not need capitalism: if anything, capitalism is strangling culture and, moreover, killing the planet. Art predates not only capitalism, but houses, farming, even language.

This does mean that every Bandcamp Friday finds my inbox even more swamped than usual with notifications of new releases, and the run-up means a significant influx of emails for review of simply notification, and it can be quite overwhelming.

It’s with almost clockwork consistency that Swedish obscure noise label Dret Skivor drop a new release on Bandcamp Friday, and this one is no exception, arriving in the form of a collaborative work between the notorious cult noisemaking vehicle that is Legion of Swine and bøe under the portmanteau moniker of BØESWINE.

In classic Dret form, bøeswine offers two longform tracks – ‘bøe’ and ‘swine’ – each of which runs for approximately twenty minutes and occupies a side of the ultra-limited cassette release. And so it is that ‘bøe’ groans and drones and groans and clanks and clatters out an amorphous mess of noise with sparks of tinnitus-inducing treble cutting through the endless hum and scratching distortion for a full nineteen and a half uncomfortable minutes. It’s pretty harsh, and darkly uncomfortable. More than harsh noise, this level of churning grey noise is hard on the ear: it’s like standing next to a cement mixer at the edge of a demolition site as every window is smashed by a wrecking ball. Once ‘bøe’ has assaulted the eardrums and left you in a state of physical and psychological ruination – and it will, it’s that dingy, grindy, mangled, abrasive – we come to the twenty-one-and-a-half-minute ‘swine’, another monster epic driven by dark noise, strains of feedback and fizzing electronics, and this time it’s amped up to the power of eleven to render THE nastiest noise.

It’s a relentless force, as harsh as an atomic detonation in your back yard. So much noise, and so relentless. And I love it. Yes, it’s uncomfortable, unyielding, positively painful. But musical experiences are simply entertainment of they don’t test. This is like the ultimate test, a work of the darkest, most fucked-up, unstructured noise. Any comparisons to Throbbing Gristle are entirely valid. Bøeswine is equally punishing and magnificent.

AA