Cruel Nature Records – 26th July 2024
Christopher Nosnibor
Who’s got guts nowadays? Who even talks about guts nowadays? When I was growing up, guts was a big deal. Succeeding or achieving against adversity took guts and the papers would applaud. Now, you’ll occasionally hear of artists giving gutsy performances, but it’s rare.
But Downtime – ‘the dynamic duo of Dave Sneddon and Mike Vest’ – yeah, they’ve got guts. But then, Mike Vest clearly has restless guts, his monumental and ever-evolving CV listing Guitar Oblivions, BONG, Drunk In Hell, Blown Out, Haikai No Ku, Modoki, Depth Charms, Brain Pills, Hollow Eyes, Lush Worker, and 11Paranoias. Collaborations include Mitsuru Tabata (Acid Mothers, Boredoms), Aoki Tomoyuki (UP-Tight), Fred Laird (Earthling Society, Artifacts & Uranium). When does this guy actually sleep?
Anyway: the naming of this project is likely ironic, and Vest’s concept of downtime differs from that of the rest of the world. He calls it downtime: we call it having a night off to sleep after finally taking a piss.
On Guts, Downtime immerse themselves in long, long, guitar and rum noise workouts, exploiting textures to the max.
The album contains but two tracks, each stretching out to the twenty minute mark.
‘Black Cherry Soda’ goes deep into a psychedelic groove, but it’s dominated by layers of feedback and blistering noise. I’m reminded of Head of David’s HODICA unofficial live album, which captured the band intentionally sabotaging a showcase gig that would have landed them a record contract by playing none of the songs and instead blasting out an ear-shredding wall of noise ;aced with a slew of uncleared samples. As middle fingers to the industry go, this stands, even now, as one of the best. The track drives forward and crashes through every fence and gate standing in its way, picking up pace and volume as it careers, out of control, onwards, ever onwards, on a heartstopping collision course towards its final resting place – smouldering in wreckage having slammed headlong against a wall, feedback and howling tones still spewing forth from the calamitous chaos. But we’re still only seven minutes in… and then shir really goes off the rails in a tempest of truly shattering noise. Every minute sounds and feels like the end, and every second is pulverising. The mess of noise, underpinned by a deep, strolling bass, is a chaos of discord, but also a spectacular document of collaborative musical capability. And this sounds like the work of more than two people.
Colossal noise is an understatement, and ‘Blue Dream’ fades in where ‘Black Cherry Soda’ tapers out, on a tidal wave of feedback before locking into a hefty psychedelic groove with thumping percussion, a foot-to-the-floor bass thunder and a blistering guitar racket that’s truly tranportative.
Downtime have no such specific agenda here, but the bottom line is that that they’ve no interest in the machinations of bigger labels and are quite content to have their staunchly uncommercial noise released to a small sliver of ‘the masses’ by a label who actually cares about what they do. If you dig noisy psychedelia, you need this.
AA
Aural Aggravation 