Panurus Productions – 6th October 2023
Christopher Nosnibor
Sometimes, you really crave something that’ll not just blow away the cobwebs, but blast a hole in your cranium big enough to pass not only the cobwebs but the entire house. That’s what I found myself craving tonight. Because… well, life. Things which should be simple and straightforward end up being stressful and taking half a day. And such days just spiral and the pressure builds and then someone tells you ‘you need to chill’ – to which ‘you need to fuck off’ seems a reasonable response. Sure, some breathing exercises and a spot of Yoga are all well and good, and I’m not actually averse to doing ‘nice’ things that may help to lower my blood pressure and help avert the risk of an aneurysm or a stroke before I’m fifty, but… but sometimes, before that, you need to release the rage, and some sonic obliteration fulfils the urge to purge. And sometimes, a short, sharp shock is the best therapy.
I was sold the second I saw the description of this release, offering up ‘An incendiary explosion from the moment you press play, salvos of chainsaw guitars and fully automatic percussion issue forth at the command of a monstrous and varied vocal delivery. Relentless and efficient, the force of T-800’s delivery is only augmented by their precision, and there is no let up in the twelve minutes this release takes to achieve its destructive aims.’
Twelve minutes? It’s an EP, right? Nope: ten tracks, the longest of which is a minute and thirty-five seconds long. I suppose it might still be an EP, since it would actually fit on a 45rpm 7” single, and I cast my eyes to my beloved 3CD box set, Grind Madness at the BBC, which collects the Peels sessions of the likes of Extreme Noise Terror, Carcass, and Napalm Death and contains about six hundred tracks, including ‘You Suffer Pt 2’, a 15-second recording of the legendary 1-second ‘You Suffer’ which is actually four seconds of noise and eleven seconds of reverb fading.
T-800’s eponymous release is nasty, gnarly, brutal, guttural gargling and crazed shrieking vocals are barely audible beneath barrelling bass, clattering, crashing drums and the most overloading, distorted guitars imaginable. This is proper old-school grindy thrash racket, and make no mistake, it’s fucking savage. The mix is dingy, dirty, and whwwn they do slow it down a bit so everything isn’t a blizzarding blur of overloading distortion played at three hundred miles an hour (look no further than the cruel pounding blast of ‘By Design’ for that), the results are bleak and tense, with the thirty-two second ‘I’ being a slow crushing loop that’s reminiscent of some of Swans’ early offcuts, as featured on the Body to Body, Job to Job, compilation.
‘Perfume Corpse’ is as pretty as it gets in its ruthless dissection of life and all things, from the raw raging of ‘Hacked Mainframe’ to the vitriolic gut-spilling of ‘Orbital Bombardment’, and in closing, ‘II’ feels like the liquefaction of a corpse seeping into the ground. And as it ends, the realisation strikes that twelve minutes is enough. T-800 is furious and filthy, and its execution is spot on. But it tears at your guts and kicks without mercy.
AA
Aural Aggravation 